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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27232297">Diamonds &amp; Rust</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tiferet/pseuds/cleverThylacine'>cleverThylacine (Tiferet)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>The Voice of Stanix (Primax 1020.27 Iota) [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amicas With Benefits, Black Comedy, Canon-Typical Behavior, Canon-Typical Violence, Cassette Culture, Character Death Fix, Consent Issues, Energy Field Nonsexual Interfacing, Energy Field Sexual Interfacing, Exactly What It Says on the Tin, Explicit Sexual Content, Fix-It, Functionalism (Transformers), Genderfluid Ravage, Genetically Engineered Beings, In-Character Poetry, In-Character Political Essays, Lost Light, Medical Procedures, Mood Whiplash, MtMtE spoilers, Multi, Past Sexual Assault, Philosophy, Poetry Rounds and Arguments, Power Imbalance, Predacons, Primax 1020.27 Iota, Revolutionaries, Sexual Manipulation, Spark Experimentation, Spark Sexual Interfacing (Transformers), Sticky Sexual Interfacing, Suicidal Ideation, Surgery, Transformers Plug and Play Sexual Interfacing, Transformers Spark Bonds, Unhealthy Polyamory, disturbing mental imagery</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 21:43:41</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>32</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>36,997</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27232297</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tiferet/pseuds/cleverThylacine</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>“Take my life but don’t take away the meaning of my life.”<br/>– Joanna Russ, "When It Changed"</p><p>"This revolution doesn't belong to you any more, and I'm not finished with it yet."<br/>Or, how Ravage became his/her own person and learned to stay out of refrigerators.</p><p> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt0eH8sv-7Yo3w4Flt68SM2mQrYnsx2yB">Soundtrack on YouTube</a></p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Megatron/Orion Pax (past), Megatron/Ravage, Megatron/Ravage/Soundwave (past), Orion Pax/Megatron/Ravage/Soundwave (past), Ravage &amp; Misfire, Ravage &amp; Ratchet, Ravage &amp; Swerve, Ravage/Nautica, Ravage/Soundwave</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>The Voice of Stanix (Primax 1020.27 Iota) [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1988227</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>22</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. where my heart stopped</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">


        <li>
            Inspired by

            <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/13272438">Victory Condition</a> by <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/astolat/pseuds/astolat">astolat</a>.
        </li>
        <li>
            Inspired by

            <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/4932637">The Big Conversation</a> by <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Enfilade/pseuds/Enfilade">Enfilade</a>.
        </li>

    </ul><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>It wasn’t shadowplay, he said. But how could he know? People don’t.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Ravage's perspective on the events of MTMTE #31-32.</p><p>"You burst on the scene already a legend<br/>The unwashed phenomenon, the original vagabond<br/>You strayed into my arms and there you stayed..."</p><p>Soundtrack: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrVD0bP_ybg">Joan Baez</a>, Diamonds and Rust</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>But the universe doesn’t care where your heart stops.<br/>
That’s not the question it asks<br/>
It’s only the question we want to answer<br/>
But the universe asks us only<br/>
Where do your limbs stop?<br/>
Where does your breath stop?<br/>
Where do your eyes go dark?</p><p>The universe is patient<br/>
Again and again it listens to the lie<br/>
Again and again it lets us draw the line.<br/>
But the universe and its patience are not infinite<br/>
One day sooner or later it grows tired of waiting<br/>
It puts a hand on our back and pushes<br/>
And we find that we can go on past our hearts<br/>
We can leave them behind entirely, in fact<br/>
We can go on so much further that we can no longer look back and see them.</p><p> – <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/13272438/chapters/30368415">Megatron of Tarn</a></p><p>“I know you hate to be contained,” said Megatron, his voice as gentle and reasonable as it had ever been, and it broke my spark.</p><p>It broke me that he <i>didn’t understand</i>. The darkness was comfortable. I’d been contained since we left Luna-2; at least in this containment, he was there with me. Or something very like him was, a thing that nattered on and on about Skids trying to figure out what was going on, as if that weren’t slagging obvious, while I died another minim with every word, because I’d been wrong, and he really meant it.</p><p>I was going to have to do it. I was going to have to do him in, and I couldn’t; because I still loved him, even knowing that this was what he’d become.</p><p>I lost my temper and I slashed at his face, and while I knew he wouldn’t hurt me, I couldn’t help thinking maybe he’d kill me and save me the choice. It wasn’t as if I’d have fought him. I could stay here and watch him keep dying by minima, or I could take his life and let our enemies take mine, because I wouldn’t get away from them, not here, not now. And if I did survive it, through some miracle bestowed by gods that I do not believe exist, I could then go back and watch Soundwave kneel to someone who wasn’t worth the dust that got stuck in his pedes. None of those options had any appeal.</p><p>So yes: I would have let him wring my neck, and thought: at least you still know how to fight.</p><p>But of course he did me no harm. Whatever was still left of him in him did love me still.</p><p>I started to argue, and everything came out at first as hisses and growls, because sapient language made everything sound so distant and clinical; I didn’t have <i>words</i> for the feeling. It hurt like it might have hurt to see my innards outside of my body, cables and wires threaded through his hands, and then, looking up into his eyes for the insanity and hunger, only to find the most terrible, reasoned, soft love, and quiet frustration—as if he thought the beast in me had died, leaving only the shell of sapient consciousness. As if I were a thing that could respond to having its spark torn loose with compassionate understanding, and a sense that it was <i>the right thing</i> to have done.</p><p>He’d betrayed us all. But my animal soul cared most that he’d betrayed Soundwave and me. Soundwave had known that he was my love even before I had set him free from the open wounds of his overclocked mind, and until we met him, there had never been anyone else for either of us, but we had allowed ourselves to fall in love, again, with Megatron, seduced by his dreams and his hopes and his words. We could have thought only of ourselves and let Shockwave set us up out in the colonies somewhere. We wouldn’t have had much, and we’d still have had to face bigotry, but we would have been safe, and Soundwave would never have had to learn to get lost in the violence around him and ride it out to the end, to swallow his kindness and claim to love screaming.</p><p>I wondered if Megatron knew how hard it had been for Soundwave, an empath, to be a war leader. We had given our lives to his cause because it was our cause. Because young high-caste mechs whose processors glitched ended up in the streets. Because animal mechs were disposable, and if you fell in love with someone else’s property and didn’t want it destroyed, you had to find a way to pay for it.</p><p>We had believed that others like us would be spared the indignities we’d suffered in his brave new world, and maybe we couldn’t have done otherwise, but there had been chances and choices; we’d chosen to give our lives to his war. We’d allowed ourselves to be sent on missions away from each other. We’d done our prison years, and usually not together, in cages much brighter and colder than this. I’d once spent thirty years waiting while the person I needed more than humans need air sat locked in his alt-mode, till some stupid flesh-child stumbled upon him.</p><p>Megatron and I had comforted each other on some of those long, painful nights. We were both missing the other half of ourselves. <i>His</i> other half was trying to run us back into the dirt where the Functionists said we belonged, because a piece of gaudy jewellery had told him that we never loved him anyway. Only the pain in my spark that wouldn’t let me let go gave me faith that mine had not returned to the Allspark.</p><p>Soundwave and I had lived with our sparks united: not just pulsing in time with each other, or merging in the joy of finding and knowing and loving each other, but also united in the hope of everything that we were fighting for, and in knowing and loving him. We’d given him everything. Our lives had been his to waste, our bodies his to expend in battle, or his to use for his pleasure, not that he ever failed to give any of that back.</p><p>And for him to say <i>none of that mattered</i>—</p><p>Megatron caught my wrist in his like it was a bird and held it fast. I wanted him to break me for attacking him, although I knew he never would. He just sat there, quiet and suddenly old, and sickeningly <i>reasonable</i>.</p><p>It wasn’t shadowplay, he said. But how could he know? People don’t. The bottom of reality had dropped right out of everything for me.</p><p>I’d wanted it not to be true so badly; I’d wanted to drag him home to my love in triumph, bloody and angry but head unbowed, so that we could go on without Galvatron and take back what was ours. I couldn’t believe Soundwave was working with Galvatron. We both knew that Galvatron hated people like me as much as any Autobot ever had. We both knew that what Galvatron really loved was violence and power. And as much as I hoped for a well-timed betrayal, that wasn’t how Soundwave did things. I’d tried to tell Soundwave that if he needed to kneel, he should stand the frag up anyway until someone worth kneeling to came along.</p><p>But Megatron wanted us all to give up and let go. To have spent all those millennia fighting, hurting and cold and alone and lost, giving ourselves to whatever he said he needed right now, and for what? I/D chips, a promise that <i>maybe</i> we wouldn’t be slaves again? There had been a time when we could have just <i>stopped</i>, because we were winning, but he’d chosen not to. We’d lost Deathsaurus over that. We’d lost a lot of people. But Soundwave and I had loved him, and so…we had stayed.</p><p>It’s awful, hating someone you love so much that you want them to die. It’s worse, hating the joke that they’ve made of your life so much that you’d let them tear open your thorax and spill your innermost energon, and watching it flow would feel like relief.</p><p>I was choking on ugly tears, thick with internal lubricant, tasting of energon, clogging my intakes. But I wouldn’t let myself cry them. Megatron wasn’t Soundwave and he wouldn’t just know.</p><p>Megatron was sorry that the change in his point of view <i>disappointed</i> me—or at least, he said so. He held my wrist like it was nothing, like he always had. I would have let him pull my arm from my torso just for daring to strike him. I would have let him pin me like an exotic insect using his own spike. He would never have done either one of those things. But then, I’d also known once that he would have never done <i>this</i>.</p><p>I’d given him my life again and again. Smarts and fate and dumb luck had kept giving it back, but not for this. Soundwave would have had the strength to kill him. Soundwave had thought I had that strength too. Soundwave had been wrong; he’d always thought me better than I was.</p><p>I had nothing. I was nothing: <i>toxic Decepticon loyalty</i>. Maybe that was all I deserved. And then, I remembered a line in one of his poems: <i> the universe doesn’t care where your heart stops</i>.</p><p>This was the place where my heart stopped. And this was the place where I marched on without it, because my optics couldn’t let go and go dark, and my limbs meant to keep moving, even in this world where nothing meant anything anymore, and everything I’d loved and lived my life for meant nothing to anyone else.</p><p>You can go on without your heart, he’d said, and that’s what I did.</p><p>I spoke to him of wobbling, feeling lost, and I never showed him that I was the one who was lost, because I knew he would have preyed on that, to try and win me to his side. I hated myself for this, but I didn’t have the strength to give up and die, and I didn’t have the strength to take his life or give my own.</p><p>I couldn’t go back to Soundwave like this, and watch him bow his head to Galvatron of all people, and live in the shame of knowing that we couldn’t do any of this, of what mattered, on our own. A voice in myself, a voice that I hated, wanted to ask why Soundwave needed a leader, when he could have been one himself.</p><p>I felt for a moment like I could be done with them both, and <i>that</i> was the place where my heart stopped.</p><p>For ten shanix and a packet of Copper Curlz, I would have told Megatron <i>he’d</i> stopped my heart. But nobody offered me either, and he would have taken that as some horrible vindication of what he’d become. So I sat in the darkness and silently wept, and I answered his <i>reasons</i> with <i>reasons</i>. I let my heart stop and I just. kept. going. My limbs weren’t ready to stop moving.</p><p>Megatron didn’t break me with his fists. He’d never even hit me. Megatron didn’t break me with his kisses or his fingers, mouth, spike in my valve; he was always gentle with me (sometimes more than I would have liked, because they made me so small) and gave back as much as he took. He never took anything from his lovers that we didn’t want him to have. He could hurt us in a thousand other ways, but every time, we’d give ourselves right up to it, loving him, wanting the pain.</p><p>Megatron broke me with words that I’d never imagined I’d hear, not from him. And yet he’d always known:  the universe doesn’t care where your heart stops.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. when I wanted to be a poet like you</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>As posted to <a href="https://tfwiki.net/wiki/The_Big_Conversation">The Big Conversation</a><br/>by @cybercatastrophe</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>we met you on a cold sharp morning<br/>
under an unforgiving sky<br/>
surrounded by killers (like everyone else)<br/>
and opened a bridge to a world we could not yet imagine</p><p>it was long ago, just before dawn<br/>
when the little cop was still in love with you<br/>
and so was everyone else we knew</p><p>an army of lovers and warriors,<br/>
believing that we could set right the world<br/>
while everything was on fire</p><p>it's hard to remember after millions of years<br/>
and all of the things we broke</p><p>that once we were young<br/>
and we thought we could break every chain.</p><p>but somehow we all forgot<br/>
there were chains on our sparks<br/>
that wouldn't unlock</p><p>we are used to being betrayed<br/>
most of all by ourselves</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. telling me lies that aren't yours</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>He wasn’t leading anything I was still part of, but my feet had nothing to do except follow him anyway.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Ravage's perspective on the events during and immediately after MTMTE #32-33.</p><p>"When you're missing me, oh what do you see?<br/>Something wild that you think you'll never be<br/>Something safe that you can tend to and lead<br/>Something versatile to fill all your needs?"</p><p>Soundtrack: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHuhABPbOaE">Waxahatchee</a>, Can't Do Much</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Everyone who hasn’t actually done it thinks dissociation turns everything into a blur. No. Dissociation can be clearer than a perfect diamond. You don’t have any feelings to get in the way. Soon it became apparent that we were probably all going to die. Even though we had escaped the Decepticon "Justice" Division, the multiverse seems to abhor redundancies. And now that there was another <i>Lost Light</i> and our own dead bodies were spread out all around us, we were redundancies.</p><p>We were definitely all going to die. A part of me was content with that idea. </p><p>But even surrounded by Autobots, with a quantum mechanic who had pinched my cheeks and called me ‘poppet’, and was still determined to pet me and love me and probably even make up some absurd name for me, I couldn’t quite manage to give up and just let it happen.</p><p>I hadn’t given the world permission to stop making sense, but I had been forced to accept that it didn’t need my permission. We were standing like perfect fools with our spikes in our hands in a web of explosive quantum foam on a spacecraft where people and parts disappeared like sprites in a hologame. If only I’d stood up to Soundwave and told him to frag the hell off and find somebody else to do Megatron in. As much as I hated seeing Soundwave take Galvatron’s orders, coming out of recharge in his arms would have been infinitely preferable to listening to some poor little guy tell us all how the DJD had played with him and his conjunx endura, forcing them to destroy their relationship with no intention of letting them go. I'd become a ridiculous excuse for an operative.</p><p>Maybe it was a good thing that Soundwave and I had never officially declared ourselves junxies, even though we’d completed a number of Acts that was closer to four million than four. Now that I was stuck out here with Megatron (and probably already on the List because I hadn’t bothered killing him yet), maybe Soundwave still wasn’t on it, and maybe it was better for him if I died out here.</p><p>I wanted to tell poor little Rewind that he too, could go on without his heart. I even felt a flicker of something like caring for him. But as long as Soundwave was presumably still alive, I had no right to address his pain. And it wasn’t going to hurt long for any of us, anyway.</p><p>Every now and again, Megatron took my hand. Mostly it was just to give me orders that I didn’t need through chirolinguistics. I already knew it wasn’t a good idea to express any opinions out there. Sometimes, though, especially when Rewind was telling his story, I wondered if he thought he was doing that for me (he needn’t have bothered) or for himself. If he was doing it for himself, and I’d actually been in my frame and not floating along above it, I probably wouldn’t have given him that comfort.</p><p>The habit of obedience dies hard without a heart. He wasn’t leading anything I was still part of, but my feet had nothing to do except follow him anyway.</p><p>Then, with our own lives still resolutely unsaved, they all started arguing about saving some planet that was liable to explode all around us.</p><p>It’s true. I do care more about saving Cybertronians than saving organics. I don’t hate them or wish them all dead; I just like my own species best. I had tried to tell Megatron more than once that if not being Functionalist meant sapient beings had a right to determine their own fates, I couldn’t think of a logical reason why it should matter whether a sapient being was made of flesh rather than steel, no matter how ridiculously sad their tiny lifespans were. (That had gone over about as well as when I’d tried to tell him leaving Scorponok alive in eternal pain would be not only cruel, but stupid, because his own life experiences alone should’ve shown him exactly how that would end up.)</p><p>I was not opposed to saving strangers just because they might be easily torn and full of goo.</p><p>I was, however, opposed to trying to save strangers when we weren’t even sure they <i>existed</i>. All we knew about that planet was that it likely could support life—not that it actually did. We didn’t know for sure if anyone even lived there at all, and I thought we should get the frag out of the way if the planet was going to blow all of us up, because what if it was just a ball of mud that hadn’t even yet started breeding bacteria? I tried to point this out and got exactly nowhere.</p><p>Megatron was actually trying to talk sense until they started pointing to his dumb red badge. It was embarrassing. Rewind was the first to volunteer to go, of course. If Soundwave had just been tortured to death in front of me, I’d have been first in line, too. But then the lunatic who kept trying to pet me turned to me immediately and told me that I couldn’t go because I had paws, as if she had any idea what I might be able to do with those paws.</p><p>I hadn’t <i>asked</i> to go. I had no desire whatsoever to go and risk my life to save people who might not exist. Was she hallucinating? Were our lives in the hands of a quantum mechanic who’d started to hear voices? And then Megatron <i>did volunteer</i>.</p><p>I very resolutely <i>did not think</i> about what would happen if Megatron got himself killed and left me a lone Decepticon (barring the survival of the double agent who had caused all this, of course), in a ship full of people who’d just seen what the DJD had intended to do to them. All I could do was hope that either he would succeed in this, or that Soundwave would never find out what had happened to me. Sometimes—not often—not knowing is better. I would’ve been willing to bet there were things that Rewind would really have rather not known.</p><p>Of course I’m writing all this down, and if you’re reading it, you already know that we didn’t all die. The lunatic’s mad plan worked, and we made our way back to the real <i>Lost Light</i>, alive. Even Rewind, who belonged in the other world; apparently ours was already dead.</p><p>In a transitory flash of non-suicidal ideation, I asked Megatron to send me back to Earth. Maybe I’d make it back there alive, have a giant fight with Soundwave, get my brains fragged back in and then tear Galvatron’s throat out. Those all sounded like workable plans in the blissful, invincible haze of not-being-actually-dead. Maybe my heart was still there after all.</p><p>Megatron looked me straight in the optics and asked me to stay.</p><p>Seeing what the DJD was capable of was supposed to have made me stop wanting to be a Decepticon, instead of wanting to change what being a Decepticon <i>meant</i>. Or, more importantly, to get back to what it had meant in the first place, before he had lost his fool mind over whether or not it was possible for organics to like us when we weren’t throwing wars on their homeworlds, instead of focusing on the part where Cybertron needed to stop manufacturing slaves.</p><p>“Stay”, he said. “As my ally,” he said. Out loud.</p><p>I took his hand, and the Autobots present thought that was some kind of agreement, but we were actually using chirolinguistics again. I was telling Megatron that the conversation we’d had with Rewind had made me think that I needed to go home, have a fight with my boyfriend of four million years, and then maybe go get conjunxed already.</p><p>I hadn’t actually <i>managed</i> to have a giant fight with Soundwave at any time during the previous four million years. I had always assumed that this was because he was a telepath and an empath, which helped a lot with communication.</p><p>We’d never been given to fighting <i>before</i> Senator Ratbat had told him that he’d have to back me up on tape if he wanted to keep me at his new job, but even though I’d been reprogrammed as a cassette, it was theoretically still possible for me to have a fight with my carrier. Because he loved me, and he wanted me to make my own decisions, Soundwave had always been careful even about expressing vague preferences, reassuring me constantly that he didn’t ever want me to do anything in his name that I didn’t want to do.</p><p>But Megatron, still looking straight into my optics, smiled sweetly, and said into my hand: <i>If you think he will let you.</i></p><p>And there I was, half a galaxy away from Soundwave and Laserbeak and everyone I loved <i>but</i> Megatron, at Soundwave’s orders, when I hadn’t wanted to go. When what I had wanted to do was talk Soundwave into leading the faction, instead of agreeing to help Galvatron, who had never respected Soundwave, and had never liked people like me.</p><p>Whenever Soundwave managed to get a message through to me, it was always short, because he didn’t write long messages…but it was always full of longing. But this time, he was alone because <i>he was the one who had chosen to send me here</i>.</p><p>Still shaken, and shaking with rage, I followed Megatron back to his habsuite.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. even among the ones who know better</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>As posted to <a href="https://tfwiki.net/wiki/The_Big_Conversation">The Big Conversation</a><br/>by @cybercatastrophe</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>even among the ones who know better<br/>
we still fall into old patterns</p><p>I shouldn't have let them change me<br/>
but it was so tempting<br/>
to let you carry me next to your spark<br/>
and sliding through tape heads, completely encased<br/>
was even a greater pleasure than I had imagined</p><p>(and we only ever pretended we even had a choice)</p><p>but I should have known that once he was gone,<br/>
someone else would still set you above me<br/>
because even before you had two legs<br/>
and I ran on four</p><p>do not be afraid.<br/>
we will both come home.<br/>
we will not be alone.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. don't make small bargains</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>This was a dream about something that actually happened.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>An interlude between MTMTE #33 and MTMTE #34.</p><p>Also, for the benefit of my non-Transformers fandom friends: the character of "Orion Pax" grew up to be <i><b>Optimus Prime</b></i>. "Orion", "Orion Pax", "the Prime" and "Optimus Prime" are the same person. It is canon in several TF continuities that he and Megatron were friends and cared for one another before they became bitter enemies, and that the young Orion was involved at least peripherally with the early Decepticon movement before he became a Prime.</p><p>"If I'm a broken record, write it in the dust, babe<br/>I'll fill myself back up like I used to do<br/>And if my bones are made of delicate sugar<br/>I won't end up anywhere good without you"</p><p>Soundtrack: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaA7I7B1pOk">Waxahatchee</a>, "Lilacs"</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“I’m not going to become an Autobot.” It was weird, looking up at Megatron without looking <i>up</i> to him. He’d always treated me as an equal, but I had always thought he was smarter, wiser, and a better poet than I was, and trusted that there were things he understood that I could not. Even when he was clearly out of his mind, I’d never been sure that he didn’t know something that I didn’t know. I still loved him, but now I felt sorry for him, too, and I wished I’d tried harder to win some of our previous arguments.</p><p>“I asked for an ally, not an operative,” Megatron said quietly. “Get up here. Do you think I’m going to let you sleep on the floor?” He patted the recharge slab. It was big enough, but I stretched myself out to my full length and lay down on the floor. I was not going to lie down with him. I knew what would happen if I did, and I didn’t feel like rewarding him for his treachery, even though I knew he’d make sure I enjoyed it.</p><p>“You are really incredibly stubborn,” he said, looking down at me. “I know you love me, and yet you accepted an order to kill me. Did you even try to protest it?”</p><p>Of course I’d tried to protest it. I’d told Soundwave it was a rotten thing to ask me to do and that I damned well knew Galvatron had a hand in it. But I had still obeyed. “I wouldn’t be so sure of my love,” I grumbled, “if I were you, traitor.”</p><p>Megatron rolled his optics and stretched out. “I’m sure you’re in pain. <i>I</i> may not be an empath of any variety, but I know that knot between your shoulders. Anyhow, I’m going to try to recharge. So cut that out. They can probably hear you lashing your tail three decks up.”</p><p>“Go self-service, you traitor,” I muttered.</p><p>“<i>Could</i> you protest it? Or were you halfway to the launch site before you even realised what he had asked you to do?”</p><p>I hissed at him. The lights went out. He rolled on his side, turning his back to me.</p><p>I thought about taking the shot he was offering. Surely he knew I wasn’t unarmed. But it didn’t seem worth it, knowing he probably wouldn’t even fight. I didn’t want to do this for Soundwave, nice and quiet, and try to hide from the Autobots until we touched ground somewhere else, then run home. I <i>wanted</i> a fight, but Soundwave hadn’t let me fight, and Megatron wouldn’t give me a fight.</p><p>So I closed my optics instead. And I dreamed about Soundwave. </p><p>This was a dream about something that actually happened, when I was about twenty-one, and he was a few years younger. Not centuries; actual years. We were sitting at the broken table in our squat, and we had a rust stick. Laserbeak and Buzzsaw were playing a noisy game involving their half. Our half had already broken in two pieces, and I kept insisting that Soundwave was bigger than I was and needed the bigger piece more, but he ate the smaller one anyway.</p><p>I put the big piece in my mouth and beckoned him over to kiss me, thinking I’d bite it in half when his lips touched my muzzle, but he just pushed it into my mouth with his glossa and laughed, so I had to eat it.</p><p>I woke up some hours later alone, on Megatron’s recharge slab.</p><p>I remembered the dream, and let my mind go wandering through recordings of other nights I had spent with Soundwave back then. I hadn’t been a cassette yet, then. He had not been a carrier, either. I’d still been small, but I’d been able to put my paws on his shoulders when I stood up bipedally, which was something that I had been able to do easily. He’d had to pick me up to kiss me, though, or pull me into his lap, or lay me down.</p><p>As always, my mind wandered to the night when Soundwave had carried me up to the roof. I remembered him laying me down on a thick blanket, then lying beside me. There weren’t a lot of lights on in the Dead End, and you could actually see a couple of stars, but we didn’t look at them long; what we’d wanted was to get away from Buzzsaw and Laserbeak, who were recharging, but always woke up if we made any noise. And I always made noise when he kissed me.</p><p>We could lie on that roof for hours, kissing and holding each other; he’d wrap me up in his field so the rest of the world fell away. I would open the panels in my wrists to him and let him slip cables into my data transfer ports, and do likewise for him. But I always froze, back then, when he reached for the panel that covered my interface array. And even though I couldn’t think at all when I froze like that, and I had never told him why, he always looked at me as if he knew, and was content to wait until I trusted him. He always let it pass without complaint, even when I left smears of lubricant all over his thigh because the panel was slightly warped.</p><p>The problem was that I <i>did</i> trust him. I had never thought he would hurt me. I <i>wanted</i> him. But my frame remembered that once that panel was open, what followed was pain.</p><p>On that particular night, however, instead of reaching for the panel between my legs, he had opened up his chest and offered me his brilliant, steady spark. I opened my own chest up, and pressed it into his; his spark flared bright and drew mine down into itself as our bodies settled against one another.</p><p>Soundwave had told me what it was like to be him, but experiencing it for myself was absolutely overwhelming. He was vast, and what was to me empty air was full of streams of data, singing in colours; if he didn’t wear a mask, the flavours in the air would pop like bubbles on his glossa. He was constantly running thousands of parallel processes; some of which existed only to record and discard unnecessary data. And yet, where we connected, everything was completely clear and still.</p><p>I was the single fixed point around which everything fell into place. He saw the black brushed metal of my frame through the golden radiant warmth of my field, which was bigger by far than my body. The first time he’d sensed my presence, I’d been in the grip of despair, and even though he’d been desperately lost, he’d wanted to soothe me, but hadn’t known how. The second time he’d noticed me, I’d been with the birds, and he’d forgotten his name, but he remembered mine. He believed I was <i>kind</i>. And I made him feel safe. There were only two things he was able to want in that moment. One of them was to be sane again. The other one was for <i>me</i> to be safe.</p><p>Now, he wanted more than that; he knew he was in love with me, and I with him. He had never even considered questioning his desire on account of my function or form. I wanted him, too, and as we shared our desire, arousal and pleasure, my body stopped fighting itself.</p><p>Our first shared overload made me feel like I <i>was</i> a star. We made love all night on that roof. I took his valve seal. He’d never done any of this before.</p><p>I felt as though I hadn’t, either.</p><p>I could not believe that Soundwave was actively <i>trying</i> to control me. He had to give me orders in battle, but he had always made it clear to everyone in the Conclave that I was not his property. For that matter, neither were the birds, or the twins. But they were his friends, and I was his lover; he made sure that everyone who mattered was aware of that.</p><p>Sometimes—not infrequently—people who wanted favours from Soundwave sought them through me.</p><p>But I was always the one who let things go, even when I wasn’t sure they were good ideas. And sometimes they really weren’t. For one thing, I had always thought it was idiotic for Soundwave to take the field. Not only was it painful for him, as an empath, it was a waste of his talents. He had the entire fleet wired for sound, and if he had died, the Decepticon Fleet would’ve been completely sunk; nobody else really understood how the things he made <i>worked</i>.</p><p>I’d argued a lot more with Megatron. But with Megatron, sometimes I won. And Soundwave made better decisions. The only decision Soundwave had made that I’d never come fully to terms with had been keeping Ratbat alive and trying to reprogram him.</p><p>Why had I never just killed him when Soundwave was gone? I had never believed that Soundwave could make Ratbat a decent person. Even with his old memories gone, he still became a monster all over again.</p><p>Megatron wouldn’t have done a thing about it if I’d taken Ratbat out; he would probably have cheered me on. But I hadn’t, and I didn’t know why.</p><p>Megatron came out of the washracks then, and saw me weeping silently on his recharge slab. I was relieved when he didn’t ask me why. I didn't want to hear the questions he would have asked me if I had explained.</p><p>Instead, he dug his fingers into the knot between my shoulders and teased it out. And I let him. Then he dropped a kiss on top of my head, between my ears, and said, “Rest.”</p><p>And I did.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. a judgement deferred</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>As posted to <a href="https://tfwiki.net/wiki/The_Big_Conversation">The Big Conversation</a><br/>by @cybercatastrophe</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>it's hard to live with the anger sometimes<br/>
when I know you cannot remember the things you did<br/>
or the way that you used us.</p><p>but still I maintain<br/>
that you don't deserve to live so close to his spark</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. a half-seen hand, demanding</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Do you still want to be like this?</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Concurrent with the events of MTMTE #34.</p><p>"Feels like a lifetime just trying to get by<br/>While we’re dying inside<br/>I’ve done a lot of things wrong<br/>Loving you being one but I can’t move on<br/>You know I…. I’m afraid of change<br/>Guess that’s why I stay the same"</p><p>Soundtrack: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhjTa_7Nq6Y">Noah Cyrus</a>, "July"</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The first few days that I spent on the Lost Light as an actual known quantity were bewildering and upsetting. Someone that Megatron liked got killed almost immediately, after trying to save a wounded person who turned out to be a member of the DJD, because apparently they hadn’t got too far away from us. Trailcutter was his name. He’d had a drinking problem. So had Megatron, once. We drank <i>a lot</i> before we rebelled.</p><p>I let him spoon me on his recharge slab and purred to him, speaking silently hand-to-hand. I told myself it was different, because he was upset about this bot he’d seen potential in, and I knew how hard he could take that sometimes. But when they told him the body was down in the morgue, Megatron brought my hand to his mouth, and kissed my palm and the pads of my fingertips before he got up. I could’ve extended my claws, I could’ve untangled my hand from his, I could have said no.</p><p>But I didn’t want to say no, even when I dragged my aft out of his bed and went to wash up a bit. I considered requesting my own habsuite...but did I really want to recharge alone among Autobots? Was Megatron really safe on this ship?</p><p>I looked like a wreck when I saw myself in the mirror. My optics were dim and my face was grey and pinched. My fuel tank was nearly empty and I searched the habsuite for an energon dispenser or even a stray cube, but there wasn’t anything there. And despite the low-fuel indicators going off in my self-care subroutines, I didn’t feel hungry. What I felt was a fluttering, sick sensation in my auxiliary drives, as if I’d been hit with a specialised virus.</p><p>Something was going on inside my deep memory banks—the ones I didn’t keep in my head. I didn’t have all of them with me; that would have been stupid—but I did have some of Soundwave’s old personal logs in a cache, because they comforted me when I was away from him. Some of them went back to the earliest days of the revolution, and nobody else needed to be trying to decrypt them.</p><p>I tried to comm Megatron, but a high-level auto-responder pinged back and asked if this was an emergency. I had no way of knowing whether that was his own doing or somebody else’s.</p><p>I didn’t want to tell the Autobot medics. For all I knew they were doing this to me. I sure as slag was not about to turn over Soundwave’s files. But after I purged the little fuel I had left in one go, I made my way down to the medbay. If someone on board had actually ordered this, I figured I’d be able to tell when I saw how people reacted. And as much as I didn’t want to, I could always reformat those sectors. We had backups on Io.</p><p>The medic who spoke to me first seemed young to me, and he was a bit of a prig. I did not think he was covering up any enemy action against me. I did think he might not be able to find his own aft with a targeting matrix, and that did not make me especially confident, but he was upset, and maybe he’d also been Trailcutter’s friend.</p><p>I just couldn’t deal with the intake questions. He seemed obsessed with the notion that I was in some kind of trouble.</p><p>Of course I felt threatened and afraid; I was ill, and I was the lone Decepticon on a ship full of Autobots.</p><p>Was someone hurting me? There were two of them. Soundwave had betrayed himself and me; Megatron had betrayed us all. The two people I loved more than humans love air had become bitter enemies, and they’d thrust me into the space between them, holding the not-so-metaphorical smoking gun, and unsure where to aim.</p><p>Had anyone been ordering me to do things I knew were wrong? Sure, let’s assume that I still know what wrong even is.</p><p>Had I been sent there under duress? Why else would I even be there?</p><p>Did I have any backup or recall chips people should know about? Because yes, if I were a suicide bomber I’d certainly have told him so.</p><p>It appeared that this person, First Aid, was convinced that I was suffering some sort of psychiatric emergency, which was, to be fair, probably also true. But I didn’t want a psychiatric evaluation, and I really didn’t want Autobot psychiatric care.</p><p>I <i>wanted</i> my memory banks to stop feeling like someone clumsy and mean was running unauthorised searches inside me, and sometimes <i>deleting things</i>. After the second round of this, I jumped off the table, only to hear a voice I still recognised after four million long years shout “Shut up!” The years had not been especially kind to Ratchet, but he’d finally grown into his voice.</p><p>Ratchet had had a free clinic back in The Dead End, in the days when ‘free’ was the only kind of clinic I went to, especially when the damage that I had sustained came from Ratbat. Of course I remembered him. Who forgets Ratchet? Apparently, he still remembered me.</p><p>“I’ve known Ravage since before the war began,” he told the other medic. “I know what Soundwave’s guilty of as well as anyone else here does, but Soundwave is in love with Ravage and has always been. I wouldn’t believe that Soundwave was responsible for anything harming this mech unless he told me so. Which he has not.”</p><p>Apparently, he still remembered Soundwave, too.</p><p>First Aid was trying not to stare. “Soundwave…? In love?”

</p>
<p>Ratchet ignored him, listened to my explanation, scanned me, and ran at least four antivirals on my system. The data stopped moving around on its own, but whatever had caused it wasn’t in anyone’s database. None of the files were newer than they were supposed to be, but I was convinced they had changed.</p><p>Ratchet believed me. He had always believed me. But without the backups on Io, there was no way to prove it. I got an infusion of medical-grade energon to replace what I’d purged and an anti-radiation treatment just in case, because we’d all been way too close to the quantum foam, and then he sat down next to the table and covered me up with a blanket, and I hadn’t actually known I was cold, but it felt like a blessing. “I don’t have any idea what caused you to have those symptoms,” he said, “but I do have some other concerns.”</p><p>“Everyone does,” I grumbled. “I’m not being abused.”</p><p>“No, of course not.” Ratchet said it so readily I wondered if he was mocking me. But I’d always told him who’d hurt me when I was a slave, except for the time I got mugged and would’ve been left for dead if Soundwave hadn’t come barrelling out of nowhere and scared them all off. I hadn’t told him then because I hadn’t known, but Soundwave had told him. Then Deadlock, who’d been using a name I couldn’t remember back then, had gone with Soundwave to help him take care of it.</p><p>“Soundwave used to bring you in. I knew <i>he</i> wasn’t the one who worked you over. That was apparent from the way he behaved. And Megatron wouldn’t dare. Not here.”</p><p>“Please, don’t patronise me too,” I said. “You never did before. I couldn’t bear it. And Megatron wouldn’t, at all. He’s never struck me, either.”</p><p>Ratchet shrugged. “I can’t <i>imagine</i> being caught between Soundwave and <i><b>Megatron</b></i>. Does Megatron know why you’re really here?”</p><p>“Yes,” I said quietly, “so maybe don’t <i>you</i> ask.”</p><p>“So when did you and Soundwave break up?”</p><p>I shook my head. “We didn’t.”</p><p>Ratchet ran his fingertips along a silver strut in my forearm that was also part of my old cassette casing. “I have to say I’m disappointed you were left like this. You’re still under Soundwave’s manus, aren’t you? You’ve had a refit or two since I saw you last, but I bet you could still fold up and into his chest. I know that neither you nor Soundwave ever wanted that. I thought he’d have had this undone before now. Did Megatron tell him to leave you like this? How many cassettes does he have now, anyway?”</p><p>“I wasn’t under the impression that all of it <i>could</i> be undone.” I shrugged; I wasn’t about to start counting cassettes. “Laserbeak doesn’t mind it. And I hate to say it, but Buzzsaw <i>needs</i> supervision; he thinks he's an artist, you know. Soundwave loves me, I’ve always known that, and it means a lot to him that I’m with him of my own free will. I trusted him.”</p><p>Ratchet made a noise that sounded a lot like “Harrumph,” looked at me pointedly, and ex-vented.</p><p>“I still do,” I rushed to assure him. “Anyhow, Rumble and Frenzy were miners with Megatron, once, and including them was his idea. After that, yes, I did assume that Megatron wanted things that way.” I shrugged. “Look, we’ve all been given orders we didn’t care for. I don’t believe you’ve never experienced that. Everyone on either side of this war has done things that they didn’t want to do. I’ve even been given one order I didn’t obey.”</p><p>“Yet,” Ratchet finished for me. Like he knew what it was. I wasn’t dumb enough to confirm his suspicions, whatever they were. Finally he shrugged. “It’ll always be in the back of your mind, until you do <i>something</i> about it, or Soundwave rescinds it. That’s how the old protocols work.”</p><p>”The <i>old</i> protocols?” I laughed. “Of <i>course</i> there are new ones. Autobots have cassettes, too. Did you think I’d forget that, Ratchet?”</p><p>“Of course not.” He leaned over me, so that I had to look into his old, familiar face. “Do you still <i>want</i> to be like this?”</p><p>“No,” I admitted, “I don’t.” Even I was surprised at how quickly I spoke.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. a miscommunication</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>As posted to <a href="https://tfwiki.net/wiki/The_Big_Conversation">The Big Conversation</a><br/>by @cybercatastrophe</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>He asked me, very gently, if anyone was hurting me.<br/>
I was insulted. Is that what they think we're all like?</p><p>No, I said. You clearly know there's something going on.</p><p>They say they're different from us and they are.<br/>
Never a warning that privacy doesn't exist for us here;<br/>
We knew they were listening, which is how it all started again<br/>
because I had to let him hold my hand to have a private conversation.</p><p>I told them, okay, I've been hurt by this mech.<br/>
He broke my spark when he gave up on us, who loved him,<br/>
and told us he didn't trust us to course-correct.</p><p>When he asks me to stand with him under your symbol<br/>
And abandon the only person I've ever loved more?<br/>
Sure, it feels like he's pulling my cables out--what do you know?</p><p>And the one back home, that you've seen me with in the field--<br/>
how dare you assume that the way he speaks to me in a fight<br/>
is the way he speaks to me in our berth?</p><p>Can you not understand that I have never been afraid of him?<br/>
I just want to be able to say that I choose him again, and have it be true.</p><p>So, yes.<br/>
I am absolutely feeling unsafe.<br/>
And people are hurting me here.</p><p>But actually I didn't say a word of that,<br/>
because I need their help.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. you who are so good with words</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>and doesn't that just sound like something from out of some holonovela?</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Concurrent with the events taking place during MTMTE #35-36.</p><p>"There's a time when every man draws a line down in the sand<br/>We're surviving, we're still living, are we stronger?<br/>You've been cheatin' on, cheatin' on me<br/>I've been cheatin' on, cheatin' on you<br/>You've been cheatin' on me<br/>But I've been cheatin' through this life..."</p><p>Soundtrack: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIGNNOZ0948">Vampire Weekend</a>, This Life</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Here’s the thing about time travel. It makes no fragging sense whatsoever, and it’s ridiculous, and it also scares you out of your wits.</p><p>Well. Actually, those are three things about time travel, except two of them are the same, so I guess that makes two.</p><p>I hadn’t been imagining it. Something had been rewriting my old historical files. Megatron told the Autobots that I wasn’t involved but they questioned me anyway. I didn’t have any of the answers they wanted.</p><p>Brainstorm, the time-travelling Decepticon spy who was responsible for our current and recent predicaments (and doesn’t that just sound like something from out of some holonovela?) was possibly even less of a Decepticon than Megatron was. So far as I could tell, he was acting one hundred and ten per cent on his own whimsy. (Later, we found out that he did it for love. But he did it for love of a mech who didn’t even want him. At least I only make a fool of myself over people who want to spike me.)</p><p>The idea of someone going back in time to kill Orion Pax probably didn’t bother me as much as it should have, because I really fragging hate him for a number of reasons that make very good sense to me, and that’s the end of it. He didn’t just hurt Megatron; he made him <i>crazy</i>. I do consider him at least partially responsible for a number of atrocities that actually happened, and hundreds more that I was able to prevent. The only person I hate more is probably Starscream.</p><p>(Well, there’s Ratbat. But that was personal.)</p><p>Waking up in a life where the Autobots hadn’t won didn’t sound so damn bad to me personally. I will admit that I had the occasional daydream about what it might be like to live in the wilderness, surrounded by elephants, as the beloved spouse of a planetary governor, or something else of that nature. I did not share these daydreams with Megatron, because I’m not an idiot. I might have written some lurid erotic prose, though.</p><p>I didn’t like my poetry back then, because I kept comparing it to Megatron’s. He wrote about empires and unsheathed knives and burning cities, and the hunger of life to go on. I wrote like a lovesick idiot who held grudges over a lot of petty grievances. I had yet to understand that the personal can also be political.</p><p>But Soundwave got to see some of my erotica, because in erotica, it doesn’t actually hurt to sound like a lovesick idiot. Not that I was going to send him any of this. I knew exactly how long it would take him to ask me why I was still wherever I was and why Megatron wasn’t dead yet, and neither of those were questions I wanted to answer.</p><p>Anyhow, there was absolutely nothing I could tell Megatron or anyone else about Brainstorm, because, surprise, I didn’t fucking know anything about Brainstorm.</p><p>There were a lot of rumours about me. The most annoying one was the one that was (partially) true: I was sleeping with Megatron. I got better recharges, and so did he, when we were both on the slab together. But we weren’t interfacing.</p><p>We argued ourselves to sleep, most nights. Sometimes out loud, sometimes in hand. I preferred the latter; I was sure that his habsuite had more bugs in it than the entire Daeneuvian rainforest, and he couldn’t assure me otherwise.</p><p>One night, though, I did ask the question. “Why?”</p><p>“Why what?” We were speaking out loud that night. If they were listening in, I didn’t particularly care in the heat of that particular moment.</p><p>“You haven’t tried to ‘face me. You haven’t even tried to kiss me on the mouth.”</p><p>Megatron spoke very calmly, and the lack of inflection made all of the words that he said sound even worse than they already did. “I spoke to Ratchet. I do not believe that you are capable of consent, and I do not believe you can resist your carrier’s order indefinitely. If I wanted to die during interface, I’d never have stopped fragging Starscream.”</p><p>“I thought he was my friend,” I grumbled, though of course I’d always known better. Unlike Orion Pax, Ratchet had never been one of us. He’d only patched most of us up.</p><p>“He <i>is</i> your friend.” Megatron kissed the top of my head. “No matter which of us survived, the other would be miserable. Telling me was a kindness, to both of us. You should do what he’s asked of you.”</p><p>I wrenched myself out of the little spoon position (it wasn’t easy, but he’d never meant to keep me there against my will) and glared at him. “I should have a frame refit and an alt-mode change that I’ll have to be conscious for while they reprogram my T-cog, after going through it once already before? Just for the record, I did not forget how much it hurt the first time! And I should just do this so you can get laid?”</p><p>Megatron smiled crookedly and stretched. “You are forgetting that you would also be getting laid,” he said. “I never got to have you when you were full-sized.” His expression was purely lascivious, and he was running hot. I wanted to scratch his face off.</p><p>Preferably while spiking him.</p><p>“I don’t believe you,” I told him.</p><p>“If you require release,” he said, “I can give you that, but only that.”</p><p>I rolled my optics at him.</p><p>“You are leaking internal and external lubricants. Do as you like, but you’re the one who’s recharging in that.”</p><p>“I hate you so much right now,” I grumbled, but I lay back down in his arms. I did not let him open my panels.</p><p>“I bet Soundwave misses not having to be so careful with you,” he whispered into my audial. “I only saw you once or twice before they did this to you, and not only did I never get to have you, I never got to saw him take you, either. But you were a wild thing back then. I liked you that way. I’m sure he did, too.”</p><p>“That’s it,” I said. “I’m sleeping on the floor again.”</p><p>“You are absolutely not,” said Megatron, and lay down on the floor himself, closing his eyes. “You can keep the blanket. I know how cold you get, although I also know you’re running hot right now.”</p><p>“Why am I not allowed to sleep on the floor <i>now</i>?” I snorted.</p><p>“Because, if you have even a tenth part of the sense I have long known and nurtured in you, Ravage of Stanix, you will be having surgery first thing in the morning.” And then he forcibly put himself into defrag mode at highest priority, so that we couldn’t argue about it.</p><p><i>Oh, fuck you very much, Megatron of Tarn</i>, I thought to myself as I furiously worked the arousal away, knowing that at least in defrag he would be insensible even to the yowl I was absolutely unable to repress. I did not appreciate him playing games with my allegedly-impaired consent in order to manipulate me. He could clean up the mess in the morning after I went to the medbay.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0010"><h2>10. the particle in the wave</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>01101001 00100000 01101100 01101111 01110011 01110100 00100000 01101000 01101001 01101101 00100000 01110100 01101111 01100100 01100001 01111001 00101110 00100000 00100000 01101000 01100101 00100111 01110011 00100000 01101111 01110101 01110100 01101101 01101111 01100100 01100101 01100100 00101110 00001010 00001010 01101001 00100111 01101101 00100000 01100010 01101100 01101111 01110111 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101101 01111001 00100000 01110100 00101101 01100011 01101111 01100111 00100000 01110101 01110000 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110111 00001010 00001010 01101001 01110100 00100111 01110011 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01101100 01101001 01101011 01100101 00100000 01001001 00100000 01110111 01100001 01110011 00100000 01100101 01110110 01100101 01110010 00100000 01100111 01101111 01101111 01100100 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110010 00100000 01101101 01110101 01100011 01101000 00100000 01100001 01101110 01111001 01110111 01100001 01111001 00001010</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>For translation, <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/chapters/66617308?show_comments=true&amp;view_full_work=false#comment_358314328">show comments</a> or use <a href="https://www.ConvertBinary.com">Convert Binary</a>.</p><p>Takes place in the Functionist Universe Timeline, as seen in MTMTE #35, during the events of MTMTE #37.</p><p>"Lookin' back over my life, spent the most of it tongue tied<br/>And I wish I'd had more time listenin' to you speak your mind<br/>Now I'm thinkin' about her everyday<br/>On my mind atypical way<br/>Are you a life force?"</p><p>Soundtrack: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo4HVz8aWXE">CAAMP</a>, "By and By"</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>01110010 01100001 01110110 01100001 01100111 01100101 00101110 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01101110 01100001 01101101 01100101 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110010 01100001 01110110 01100001 01100111 01100101 00101110 00001010 01110010 01100001 01110110 01100001 01100111 01100101 00101110 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01101110 01100001 01101101 01100101 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110010 01100001 01110110 01100001 01100111 01100101 00101110 00001010 01110010 01100001 01110110 01100001 01100111 01100101 00101110 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01101110 01100001 01101101 01100101 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110010 01100001 01110110 01100001 01100111 01100101 00101110 00001010 00001010 01110111 01101000 01100101 01101110 00100000 01001001 00100000 01110011 01100001 01110111 00100000 01101000 01101001 01101101 00100000 01100100 01100001 01101110 01100011 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01110100 01101000 01110010 01101111 01110101 01100111 01101000 00100000 01110011 01110100 01110010 01100101 01100001 01101101 01110011 00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01100100 01100001 01110100 01100001 00101100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110000 01100001 01110010 01110100 01101001 01100011 01101100 01100101 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110111 01100001 01110110 01100101 00101100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110111 01101000 01101111 01101100 01100101 00100000 01100100 01100001 01101101 01101110 00100000 01110111 01101111 01110010 01101100 01100100 00100000 01100110 01100101 01101100 01101100 00100000 01101001 01101110 01110100 01101111 00100000 01110000 01101100 01100001 01100011 01100101 00001010 00001010 01001001 00100000 01101111 01101110 01101100 01111001 00100000 01110111 01101001 01110011 01101000 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01001001 00100111 01100100 00100000 01101000 01100001 01100100 00100000 01101101 01101111 01110010 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101001 01101101 01100101 00001010 01001100 01101001 01110011 01110100 01100101 01101110 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110011 01110000 01100101 01100001 01101011 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01101101 01101001 01101110 01100100 00101110 00001010 00001010 01100001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100001 00100000 01101100 01101001 01100110 01100101 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110010 01100011 01100101 00111111 00001010 00001010 01110010 01100001 01110110 01100001 01100111 01100101 00101110 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01101110 01100001 01101101 01100101 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110010 01100001 01110110 01100001 01100111 01100101 00101110 00001010 00001010 01001001 00100000 01100011 01100001 01101110 00100111 01110100 00100000 01101100 01101111 01110011 01100101 00100000 01101000 01101001 01101101 00101110 00001010 00001010 01001001 01110100 00100111 01110011 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01101100 01101001 01101011 01100101 00100000 01001001 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100110 01110101 01101110 01100011 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 00101110 00001010 00001010 01010011 01101000 01101111 01100011 01101011 01110111 01100001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100011 01100001 01101110 00100111 01110100 00100000 01101000 01100101 01101100 01110000 00100000 01101101 01100101 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110111 00100000 01101001 01110100 00100111 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01100101 01101110 01100100 00100000 01101100 01100101 01110100 00100000 01101101 01100101 00100000 01100111 01101111 00100000 00001010 </p><p> </p><p>GET OUT OF MY ARCHIVES YOU SLAGGER</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0011"><h2>11. a stranger standing in my place</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Are you checking to see if I’m from an alternate universe that isn’t supposed to exist?</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Concurrent with the events of MTMTE #37-38.</p><p>"I am not the only traveller who has not repaid his debt<br/>I've been searching for a trail to follow again<br/>Take me back to the night we met<br/>And then I can tell myself<br/>What the hell I'm supposed to do..."</p><p>Soundtrack: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGF7PswOENQ">Lord Huron</a>, "The Night We Met"</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Apparently I have a persistent talent for scaring the wits out of Ratchet of Vaporex. I did it half a dozen times before I was 200 years old, and four million years later, I did it once more.</p><p>Although I had argued with Megatron about it, I had never really considered <i>not</i> having the cassettification undone. I’d argued with Megatron because he was using our chemistry to manipulate me. I’d argued with Megatron because he could, at any time in the previous four million years, have pointed out to me—and to Soundwave—that I was a lot more impaired than Soundwave and I had believed. I’d argued with Megatron because if it had really mattered to him that they were controlling me, they could have researched a way around this themselves, instead of letting the fragging Autobots figure it out.</p><p>I wanted to be able to trust Soundwave again. Despite all the things he had made me put up with, I still loved him. We had spark-merged almost every day when we were together, and I knew he didn’t want to be unhappy. I knew he didn’t <i>want</i> to control my thoughts or actions. This had been forced upon us, and he’d never meant to use it against me. But it was too easy; he could only stop himself from doing so by not expressing his own thoughts and feelings, and I really did care how he felt about things, which often meant that I made him <i>tell</i> me.</p><p>I was starting to understand why Ratbat had chosen this as revenge upon Soundwave for whatever he’d done that had made Ratbat unable to touch me, or even to look me straight in the optics. Soundwave had hated him for forcing me, so Ratbat had fixed it so I’d never be able to fully consent again. And we’d laughed at him for presuming that that he could take that from us, but he’d known better than either of us could’ve known how much this would poison our love.</p><p>Despite my dark thoughts (and I’d had plenty of those while I was hiding on the ship, scavenging rations and hiding myself from everyone), Soundwave would not have forced me to go on this mission if I had been able to stand up to him long enough to make him understand what it would do to me. I was also beginning to see that he would never have chosen to force me to share my home with Ratbat, or taken Ratbat’s memory of his revenge away, if I had been able to stand my ground. And frankly I wondered if that had even been his idea.</p><p>Because Soundwave almost always relented when it came to things that had been his decision alone; all it took was for him to see me unhappy. If I had been able to press him, he would probably have told me how much of this fuckery had been forced on us by people like Galvatron. And Scorponok.</p><p>And Megatron himself.</p><p>Because it was awfully convenient of Megatron to have brought all this up now, and not a million years ago. Now, he wanted me to leave the Decepticons, which would have meant leaving Soundwave, and the rest of our family, forever. On the Nemesis, I was the only person who could get away with questioning his decisions. But Soundwave never defied him, and Megatron had to have known that even if I didn’t like what they were doing, I could not defy Soundwave.</p><p>But as badly as I needed to be able to trust Soundwave again, I needed to be able to trust <i>myself</i> more. Right now I wasn’t sure of anything: my mind, my decisions, my feelings. I was just beginning to understand how compromised I had actually been.</p><p>I’d argued with Megatron <i>because I could</i>. Without Soundwave there, no-one could stop me. And there were a lot of things Megatron was saying and doing that needed to be argued with.</p><p>Even though I’d complained about how much it was going to hurt when I argued with Megatron, the pain was not what scared me. I don’t like pain (some people do), but I can get through it.</p><p>I was scared of being reprogrammed.</p><p>Even though I knew that Ratchet was going to remove the control codes, and not add more, it still scared me. I had been awake when they installed the cassette protocols. I <i>remembered</i> how angry and scared Soundwave and I had both been. And I remembered the exact moment when I stopped being angry and scared, because something cool and soothing was dripping down through the protoform under my cranial plates and flooding my brain module. It wasn’t mnemosurgery, after all. It was only code. But I felt it flowing through my conscious and unconscious processes, putting down roots. There’s nothing like being conscious and fully aware while feeling yourself <i>diminish</i>.</p><p>I wanted that code gone possibly more than I’d ever wanted anything in my entire life. I wanted it so much I couldn’t bear to think about how much I wanted it, and I had never really considered not having it deleted, now that I knew for sure that it was an option. But I was still terrified, because what if it didn’t work?</p><p>And what if it did, but it didn’t change anything? What if my will was just…that weak and malleable? What if all it took was a berth under my back and my wrists in the hands of a stronger mech that I trusted to make me give in and be fine with whatever either Soundwave or Megatron wanted?</p><p>Ratchet was the only medic I trusted on the Lost Light, and he knew he could handle deleting the slave-code, because he had done it for all of Blaster’s cassettes. The Autobots had modified their protocols millennia ago, but somehow, in a shocking turn of events that no-one could ever have predicted, this information had completely failed to reach medical personnel on the side that had originally <i>objected</i> to alt-mode slavery.</p><p>And my trust in Ratchet was pretty unshakeable, given all of the times I’d scared the wits out of him before I was even two hundred years old. I didn’t really care that he was an Autobot. He was still <i>Ratchet</i>; the guy I’d been able to go to when Ratbat wouldn’t pay for me to have something fixed because somebody might have figured out that he was the one who had done it.</p><p>But I will say that both Ratchet and I might have decided to postpone the procedure by just one more day if we had actually had a full understanding of the time travel shenanigans Brainstorm was still out there inflicting on us all. (Or if Megatron had bothered to tell us.)</p><p>My understanding, as I’ve mentioned before, was that since parallel universes don’t actually exist, I’d just wake up at any moment to find myself sipping an energon fizz at dusk on a palatial African estate where the elephants no longer had to worry about humans poaching them, because the only humans still in the area knew better than to mess with us. Insert embarrassing colonialist fantasies here, do not pass go, do not collect 2000 shanix. It had not occurred to me that it would be <i>some other snarky cat</i> on the veranda. </p><p>Ratchet was most concerned that both Rong and Chromedome would be unavailable, and he was irritated with me for being relieved about that. He didn’t understand why I was afraid that I’d wake up a happy, industrious, good-natured Autobot if they were around. I guess he thought I should trust him enough to believe that he wouldn’t let them do that, but the problem wasn’t that I didn’t trust him, the problem was that I wasn’t sure he’d be able to <i>tell</i>. He did tell me that a lot of mnemosurgeons ended up dying when they went too far into the brain module of a person who was still using it, and he rolled his optics at me when I said, “Serves ‘em right.”

</p><p>I remember being terrified, disappointed and unsurprised when I lost consciousness, knowing that the procedure was supposed to have been done while I was awake. And I remember that I woke up swearing, and I didn’t stop until I realised that Megatron was yelling louder than I was. He hadn’t been there when I passed out.</p><p>“Thank Primus, he’s awake,” Ratchet blurted out. I noted that Reng and Chromedome were present as well, and immediately checked myself for any long-held but secret desires to wear a red badge or call Orion Pax anything even remotely flattering.</p><p>Megatron immediately started barraging me with questions: my name, my designation at construction, my spark-type, the first words Soundwave ever said to me, my favourite rust stick flavour, what Rumble and Frenzy called me when they were angry, the name of an obscure Tarnian holiday on which he had once allowed me to do a thing nobody else present there had needed to know about, and my roles in several previously classified operations, which made me stare at him in disbelief until he finally told me that all of that had come out during his trial.</p><p>“Are you checking to see if I’m from an alternate universe that isn’t supposed to exist, even though we were technically in one just a few days ago on a dead ship?” I asked when he finally paused.</p><p>“That’s one of the things I’m checking for,” said Megatron, and not gonna lie, it bothered me that he said it so easily. “And the problem was that we weren’t in an alternate universe. One of those timelines was going to be true and the other one wasn’t, and we needed to make sure that it was the one we came from.”</p><p>“Oh.” I ex-vented, and then felt rather silly about the whole African Planetary Governor thing. “And why exactly are <i>they</i> here?</p><p>“First your internal memory banks got overloaded and then they started rewriting themselves again,” said Ratchet, glaring at everyone in the room but me, “and then you started talking in Soundwave’s voice, which is creepy enough when it isn’t in binary code, no offence, and then you started yelling at someone else to get out of your archives, and then, every dot, dash, if, and, or or disappeared from out of your brain module! Followed in very short order by the rest of you! So forgive me for being concerned that what reappeared might not have been you!”</p><p>“Looking back,” Megatron said quietly, “I probably should have encouraged you to wait until we had solved this particular problem.”</p><p>“<i>You <b>think</b></i>?” I snapped, and came up swinging off the table, except that Ratchet outweighs me by really a lot, so I didn’t get far.</p><p>“Easy now, Ravage,” he said. “You’re all right. Everything looks fine compared to your preliminary scans, except that the controls are <i>completely</i> gone. This may actually have been fortuitous. The control processes were a lot more complex than the standard and I’m not sure I could’ve gotten all of them out if I hadn’t been able to see them try to snap back when you returned. Rung thinks we probably wouldn’t have got it all out without this little twist of fate—”</p><p>“You have <i>scans</i> of my <i>brain</i>?” I sputtered. “I’m going to personally watch you destroy every copy!”</p><p>“How <i>else</i> are we supposed to know if we got it all right?” Ratchet glanced at Megatron, then gave him a smile with a slightly vengeful twist. “Actually…<i>he</i> had some of them. From the postnatal centre in Stanix. I’m glad he had them, they were useful for comparison—”</p><p>Megatron threw up his hands. “I always intended to give those to Soundwave and you. I’ve got both of the birds, as well.”</p><p>“Stop,” Rang said quietly. “She’s hyperventilating, and the barometric pressure inside her cranial cavity wasn’t optimal to begin with. She has a right to know what’s going on, but she doesn’t need to be told immediately.”</p><p>I glared right through that little fragger’s spectacles. “She’s lying right here and can <i>hear</i> you.”</p><p>“You should come to movie night at Swerve’s tonight,” Chromedome told me, grinning. “I bet he’d even let <i>your boyfriend</i> in after this.”</p><p>”He is not <i>my boyfriend</i>,” I snapped, and Megatron said it with me in unison, except he called me ‘she’ because that’s where I was on the How Does Cat Gender Scale that day. Then we both looked very pointedly at everyone but each other.</p><p>“That said,” Megatron continued, “I think we could both use some quiet time.”</p><p>I looked up at Ratchet, ignoring the rest of them. “So how much of all this did you actually get to finish?”</p><p>Ratchet ex-vented. “We’ll have to work on the T-cog and the frame tomorrow,” he said, “and then you’ll have to wait until your protoform expands to complete the process, which isn’t going to happen right away. I’m sorry; I was hoping to get the worst of it done today.”</p><p>“The reprogramming <i>was</i> the worst of it,” I assured him, “and <i>thank you</i>, even if I am too rattled to express it correctly. That scared me a lot more than pain. Pain I’ve been taking as long as I can remember.”</p><p>Ratchet shook his head. “Just let Megatron take care of you.” I could practically hear him thinking: <i>Decepticons</i>. And I wasn’t the least bit offended. Our hierarchy of fears makes more sense. “Do not go to movie night. Do not go <i>anywhere</i>. Do not attempt to transform. And you, don’t leave her alone. Comm me if she doesn’t make sense when she talks.”</p><p>Megatron picked me up bodily.</p><p>“I can walk,” I protested. “He fixed my code. He hasn’t even started on my frame yet.”</p><p>“You tried to <i>die</i> on us, Ravage,” said Megatron. He glanced over at Ratchet. “She’s not going further than the recycler,” he promised them all, and walked out of the medbay.</p><p>“This is not the way to convince the Autobots that we’re not actually fucking,” I grumbled into his shoulder as he carried me back to the habsuite.</p><p>“Consider: perhaps I don’t care if they think we are fucking,” Megatron grumbled back at me. “Perhaps I know they think that anyway, and perhaps I know that it will probably be true before too much longer. I saw the surveillance tape. You had a seizure and you nearly died.”</p><p>“You are actually not getting laid tonight,” I told him as soon as the door shut behind us. "Especially not after some of those questions you asked me."</p><p>Megatron snorted. “Believe it or not, Ravage, I wouldn’t even want that right now if you <i>could</i>. Which you can’t.”</p><p>”I can do whatever I please,” I grumbled, but we both knew better. He put me down on the slab and handed me a cube of medical-grade before he sat down on the side.</p><p>He took out that stupid gold star that Rodimus had given to him, and stared at it blankly. “Apparently I’m not the only one who almost died today.”</p><p>I slid my paw into his hand and began to speak by hand: <i>You nearly died?</i></p><p><i>Yes. And so did Soundwave, and so did you, apparently. If I’d never lived…he would have torn out his T-cog and made himself Functionless after they scrapped you.</i> Megatron shrugged. <i>It was easier to think that I had been wrong the whole time.</i></p><p>I snorted. <i>You knew better, surely? Did you think that Orion would have done anything for people like us without you to inspire him? Did you think that Scorponok and Glitch would have risen up from the arena on their own? Did you think that even before empurata, Shockwave would have been able to protect us without your help? You were necessary. People like Soundwave and me, like Deadlock, like Laserbeak…we would have all been scrapped. Starscream might have turned out all right. He’s that kind of glitch. But the rest of us? Not without you. And not without actually fighting.</i></p><p>
  <i>Ravage, you don’t understand—</i>
</p><p>I rolled my optics; then I closed them against the light. <i>I understand just fine. You were inevitable and irreplaceable. I’ve always known. You’re the one who thinks you deserve to be forced to let them murder you. I’ve never accepted that, ever, not once.</i></p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0012"><h2>12. let us bury lies instead of the living</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>As posted to <a href="https://tfwiki.net/wiki/The_Big_Conversation">The Big Conversation</a><br/>by @cybercatastrophe</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Justice is alien to the natural world. It is inexorably sapient. And yet it cannot be outsourced.</p><p>Nature favours the strong, however they come by their strength. We are deceived when we believe that those who become strong cannot take whatever they will from us, or that we do not need to become stronger to thrive.</p><p>But the grace of the strong is in choosing what to protect and what to destroy, and when to trust in the strength of each other so new things may grow.</p><p>If every one of us were held to a perfect accounting of all of the pain we have caused, the universe would be even more of a burning grave than it already is. The world we live in has been broken over and over. There is no ledger strong enough to hold all the accounts. </p><p>If Primus exists and writes debts in his heart, his accounts are clearly in error; people die every day for being in the way of the whirlwind they didn't see coming.</p><p>Certainly those of us who have had greater power have done greater harm. Under the shields of wealth and the law, of fame and of glory, those who are shielded from seeing the evil they do can break worlds. But once they see through the lies, they will know where the wounds are. </p><p>If you need to seek vengeance for that which you loved, then of course you must and you will. Revenge is not always optional. Sometimes there's only one way to restore yourself.</p><p>But revenge should be personal. I am not saying that you cannot have revenge unless you are one person with power enough to break through these shields, but I do say: revenge is not for the bystanders.  Our rulers and courts should not be in the business of dispensing revenge for those who refuse to hold their own blades in their hands.  We should not lock people away so that those who want to believe that the world is already just can forget them and tell themselves they are safe, and pretend that those who have done these terrible things are not like ourselves.</p><p>Those who wish to heal what they've done to the world cannot bring back the dead, or restore the great works of the past. But they can clear a path and build anew. And there is no one old enough to read my words whose hands are clean.</p><p>There are those who will read this and say that you know who I am, who I have been before, and who I have loved and served. You will say that these sentiments are all very finely attuned to my own loves and interests. As if anyone who has loves or interests does otherwise.</p><p>But I will tell you this: I did what I did because there were murders that were hidden from the world, and the people who were murdered were some of them mine, people that most of you never had to face.  I could not accept the knowledge that your comfort was bought with their extinguished sparks. Even though you did not know this, and you were deceived, it is still true.</p><p>All that we can do, together, to honour those who fell in innocence, is to stop throwing stones and use them to build anew.</p><p>There will be some who will never care about the pain they caused. But if they fall to vengeance, let it be at the hands of those they wronged, and not some cold-construct just following orders, who doesn't deserve to be made a murderer to ease your conscience.  People who are forced to murder for hire quite often develop a taste for it.  </p><p>There will always be those who must be stricken down if you want to survive. But after the battle is over, we who remain are all that is left. We can clean up the mess much faster together.</p><p>If we are going to deceive ourselves and say that justice, which does not yet exist, should become a real thing, then we also have to be real. Everything has been broken. It doesn't matter who broke it. Maybe that person is dead. There are broken things everywhere. Many of them are in front of you, now, wherever you are. Pick them up and put them back together, one by one. Be a source of wholeness. </p><p>If you are a weapon (whatever your function or form) do not allow yourself to be used for any violence not your own, except when you want to protect what cannot protect itself.</p><p>The world we believe awaits us after we die when we lie to ourselves, isn't real. But it could be. Pick up the pieces, don't think of who scattered them. Rebuild what was broken and possibly someday, we will be able to live in the world we thought we were making.</p><p>If a monster sheds its armour when struck with your blade, and you can see the bloody protoform, too weak and vulnerable to do you further harm, you can show mercy if you dare, and it may give you strength you did not have before. The monster you pardon today may stand at your side when the next one comes.</p><p>There is no world outside the empire of blades and claws.  But when the knife is in your hand, you may choose when to strike, and when not to. Nobody else has the right to demand that you do their murdering.</p><p>Most of us who have lived through this war have murdered in the service of greed and deceptions and lies. We have too much to do to submit to the judgement of those who would leave us unable to fix what we've broken. Maybe some day, someone will kill me because I destroyed something or someone they loved, and if they do, they will be acting out of their natural rights.</p><p>But I don't have to let it happen. </p><p>And I will not accept my death from heads that nod over books, and would not have the courage to strike out my spark on their own behalf. The shining city will never be built if only clean hands are unchained.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0013"><h2>13. if I could change your mind</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Amicitia with <i>benefits</i>?</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Concurrent with the events of MTMTE #39.</p><p>"If I go right<br/>And you go left<br/>Hey, I know we'll meet up again<br/>And if you go left<br/>And I go right<br/>Hey, maybe that's just life sometimes"</p><p>Soundtrack: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2O_xa8cems">HAIM</a>, The Steps</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“We don’t have to do this right away,” I said. “You could just tighten my foreleg struts back up and wait a few days. I can tell something’s wrong.”</p><p>“No, we <i>can’t</i> wait a few days.” Ratchet looked down at me, his jaw set. “Scared? I’ll try to make it as easy for you as I can. But if you want <i>me</i> to do this, we’re doing it now.”</p><p>“We are doing this now,” said Megatron firmly, before I could answer myself. It was irritating. Even if he had been scared stupid when they told him I’d physically disappeared for five minutes during a surgical procedure, and after the stress of having almost been murdered before he was kindled.</p><p>Ratchet looked up at him. “Not your decision, Co-Captain. You’re not the patient, and I know you are not the person he would have make decisions for him if something went wrong.”</p><p>“Put me down as his amica,” Megatron snapped.</p><p>Ratchet snorted loudly. “What.”</p><p>“I want you to do it, so we are going to do it today,” I said, “and amica makes more sense than conjunx. If I had a conjunx, Ratchet, you know who that would be.”</p><p>“Amicitia with <i>benefits</i>?” Ratchet just shook his head. “Okay, well, not my place to judge—”</p><p>“Except that you totally do.” I relaxed a little. “It is the best description of our relationship, though. I feel absolutely nothing <i>romantic</i> about him.” I looked up at Megatron, daring him to say something sarcastic. Surprisingly, he didn’t.</p><p>“Ravage,” he said, “is the only person who doesn’t fear me even a little bit. In fact he slapped me in the face quite recently, and I just grabbed his wrist and held it until he calmed down.” He sat down. “Unless you think you can get Soundwave here before whatever you’re planning, and get everyone to accept that, put me down as his amica. His only other kith are in a system very far away from here. I don’t think he’d want anyone <i>else</i> on this ship to make decisions for him if something went wrong.”</p><p>“Fine!” Ratchet snapped, because we all knew that was true. “Just don’t try to pull this aftwind on Soundwave. I can’t say I like him, but the two of you shouldn’t <i>deceive</i> him—”</p><p>I had to laugh. “He knows. He’s always known. He was a participant on several occasions. Surely you remember how it used to be. Most Decepticons of a certain age do not have official endurae of any variety. People love who they love, but we all belong to the cause, and each other, and we tend not to label relationships. A relationship shouldn’t be forced into a shape to fit its function, either.”</p><p>“Ravage is also the only person who can talk me out of things, usually,” Megatron said, and he tried so hard not to make it sound like a warning that it completely backfired. “I’m not sure I want anyone else but him making those decisions, if it comes to that.”</p><p>Ratchet snorted.  “Bet you wouldn’t have said that two days ago,” he said under his breath, and it would’ve been mean if we’d all been Autobots, but it wasn’t; it was funny, and we all laughed. “You sure this ‘amicitia’ of yours isn’t the real reason Soundwave wants you dead?”</p><p>“It might be one reason,” Megatron said after a moment, “but only because <i>he’s still here</i>, and it’s definitely not the main reason.” He ex-vented. “Think about it. If he wanted me dead because of Ravage, he wouldn’t have risked their relationship like this. Soundwave’s not stupid or petty.  You’re thinking of Starscream, and even he would be smarter than that. I want the relationship entered into the medical records. Now, please.”</p><p>“Fine,” Ratchet grumbled, and pulled up the records so we could sign off on them, shaking his head the whole time. “Now, if you don’t mind—”</p><p>“Go on,” I said, as they put me into restraints. It was a <i>little</i> embarrassing to have Megatron advising him on that matter, but I did have a cougaraider frame that could collapse and slip through things most mech-frames can’t. I just didn’t like anyone there thinking about exactly how Megatron knew the best way to fully restrain me, even though Knock Out would have given the same advice and Glit might have known a few tricks neither one of them knew.</p><p>I’m not going to say much more what it was like to be refitted that way. It fragging hurt. A lot. I can’t honestly say whether being made smaller hurt more than being made bigger. They were frankly both horrible. Knowing that Megatron knew how it felt to have your alt-mode reconfigured did help, though. Soundwave had been there the first time, horrified and scared, and even though he loved me in ways that Megatron never could, he wasn’t able to supply useful information like which neural circuits it was safe to turn off temporarily, or how it might help to contract and release certain cables.</p><p>They both encouraged me to swear, and fluently. As if I’d ever needed help with <i>that</i>.</p><p>“It’ll be better after your protoform starts to expand,” Ratchet reminded me, once it was over. Then he looked up at Megatron. “Go to the trial. That’s what I want. Ravage said you weren’t planning to.”</p><p>Megatron raised one brow. “You really think that’s a good idea? I’m trying to be a pacifist, Ratchet, but I’m not sure this is the best way to test my commitment. Ravage and I would both be dead if—”</p><p>“That’s what I want. In four million years I’ve never asked Ravage to pay for a damned thing, because he never had any money, and I can’t send a bill out to Soundwave! You may be Co-Captain and his amica, but he is not an Autobot and not a member of the crew, so you are doing this, Megatron. Go to the trial, and for Primus’ sake, do not let Ravage go, either officially, like he’s got a right to do, or in secret. I don’t want him getting out of bed tomorrow. <i>Do you understand me?</i>”</p><p>“You want me to leave Ravage alone?” Megatron asked in a light tone.</p><p>“You can leave him here if you’re worried. I won't be here, but the worst thing that's going to happen to him here is that maybe First Aid will annoy him. I fully expect the two of you to step back from a lot of things over the next few days, but you are going to that trial.” Ratchet punctuated the sentence with a finger pointed at Megatron’s badge, directly over his spark chamber.</p><p>“Fine. As long as you understand that there’s only so much I can do. I only get one vote.” Megatron ex-vented. “And that nothing we do to Brainstorm can bring your friend back here.”</p><p>“I get it.” Ratchet rolled his optics at us both. “Now go put your <i>amica</i> on a recharge slab and hook up that line. He will tell you he can drink medical-grade just fine, but I’ve learned not to trust anyone who’s ever been a Decepticon to accurately assess their own pain tolerance. He is not going to sleep without pain relief, and his protoform won’t expand without proper rest and nutrition.”</p><p>I wondered drowsily if that included Orion Pax, and then I remembered that he’d been just as bad as the rest of us about knowing his own limits.</p><p>“Understood,” said Megatron, and carefully gathered me up.</p><p>“I’d be happier if you’d leave him here, but I know. You know how to handle the access line, your preferred chief of Security’s dead, I have to recharge sometime, and he’s still a Decepticon.”</p><p>“I’m going to the trial. I’ll bring him back in the morning.”</p><p>I’d like to tell you what else they said, but Ratchet had injected something into the line while I wasn’t looking, and I don’t remember anything else.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0014"><h2>14. a discussion of the three-body problem</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Three-body problem, in astronomy, the problem of determining the motion of three celestial bodies moving under no influence other than that of their mutual gravitation. ... No general solution of this problem (or the more general problem involving more than three bodies) is possible. -- Britannica.com</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Concurrent with the events of MTMTE #39, at the Decepticon Commune near the planet Jupiter.</p><p>"So we just skirt the hallway sides,<br/>A phantom and a fly,<br/>Follow the lines and wonder why<br/>There's no connection."</p><p>Soundtrack: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkITsv3Nk6M">The Shins</a>, "Phantom Limb"</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It had been two days since Soundwave had told them he thought their brother—his mate—had died among the Autobots. He had become very grim, Laserbeak thought to herself. He had thrown himself into his work, and he argued constantly with Galvatron now. Laserbeak could not remember a time when Soundwave had ever been so argumentative.</p><p>Part of this was because words were hard for him, sometimes.</p><p>And part of this was because there was nobody there to speak up for him, and also because, even if there had been, Galvatron wouldn’t have listened to a fragging cassette.</p><p>Laserbeak didn’t believe that Ravage—her brother, except when she felt like a sister sometimes, for reasons that Laserbeak couldn’t have put into words—could die without her noticing. When Nightstalker had died, they had noticed. But that was before Soundwave had come into their lives at all, let alone become their carrier.</p><p><i>{You are being a fool,}</i> she told Soundwave.</p><p>The newest members of the cohort didn’t speak to him like that. But Laserbeak remembered when her sister Ravage had fed Soundwave half her share of the energon that they couldn’t afford enough for themselves of, and Laserbeak remembered rust sticks broken into quarters again, rather than thirds. Laserbeak remembered the free clinic. Laserbeak remembered that probably about a quarter of Soundwave’s innermost energon was actually Ravage’s once, and vice versa.</p><p><i>{I did feel him dying,}</i> Soundwave thought tightly. <i>{He winked out of existence, and for a moment, I couldn’t even remember his <span class="u">name</span>.}</i></p><p><i>{You were also quite certain that you were dead, earlier. You kept asking me where you were, and how you could be alive here when you had already killed yourself,}</i> Laserbeak retorted. <i>{Stop looking for the carrier bond and look for the spark-bond. The Autobots couldn’t break <span class="u">that</span>. You’ve been spark-merging almost as long as you’ve known one another. You used to go up to the roof and frag, and we pretended that we didn’t know.}</i></p><p>Soundwave went inward. Laserbeak didn’t know the technical term for the thing that he did sometimes, but that’s what she called it; he went inward, away from the world and its dazzling confusions of streaming data. The first time she’d seen him do it, she’d been terrified he was dead, and Ravage had told her firmly that she would’ve known if Soundwave had died.</p><p>Laserbeak watched over him. Ravage would have wanted her to do that.</p><p>A few breems later, he stirred and rebooted. “Spark-bond: still present,” he said, out loud. “Ravage: alive.”</p><p>Laserbeak rolled her optics. <i>{Ravage: still yours, stupid.}</i></p><p>Soundwave grimaced. <i>{Uncalled for.}</i> He picked up a datapad and started to read it. After several more breems, he looked up abruptly and spoke. “Why would Megatron <i>do</i> that?”</p><p>“Stupid,” said Laserbeak, and dipped her beak into his half-finished energon cube. “Ravage: not symbiont.”</p><p>
  <i>{Have you actually forgotten what we looked like when you met us? And no, I do not want to hear ‘Ravi-brightspark, golden soprano bells with warm fragrant shadows inside’, or any of that nonsense—I mean what my sister actually looked like back then. She could walk on her back legs sometimes, and when she stood up like that she came halfway up your chest. She couldn’t kiss you unless you picked her up, but she put her paws on your shoulders.}</i>
</p><p>Soundwave snorted. “Ravage is a femme today? You can tell that at this distance?”</p><p>Laserbeak finished his energon cube. “Don’t tell me you can’t.”</p><p>“I <i>hate</i> Megatron,” said Soundwave another breem or so later, broadcasting anguish mixed with regret and frustration. “This has gone on long enough.”</p><p>
  <i>{Rescind orders and tell our sister that she can come home.}</i>
</p><p>“I can’t rescind an order I gave to someone whose system refuses to take them now,” Soundwave grumbled. “Ravage will come home. Or not. Ravage may stay with Megatron. You are forgetting that the Autobots would have to do that, if Ravage were taking their badge.”</p><p>
  <i>{Really? As much as Ravage hates Prime?}</i>
</p><p>“He's not Prime anymore, and she didn’t always.” Soundwave ex-vented.</p><p>“Neither did you, genius,” said Buzzsaw from his perch across the room, and Laserbeak laughed and laughed. “Neither did Megatron. But if Megatron and OP have stopped hating each other, what in the Pit does he want with Ravage?”</p><p>Soundwave rolled his optics at Buzzsaw. “They looked a lot like amica endurae once. When Pax was still around.”</p><p>Buzzsaw guffawed, until Laserbeak fired a warning shot into the air over his head. “Shut up, you slagspike,” she said, and nodded to herself. “Shut up.”</p><p>She was worried about Soundwave. He didn’t even chide them for talking like that.</p><p>Nor did it occur to her that maybe he shouldn’t be telling them what words to use when they were speaking to each other in their own home.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0015"><h2>15. don't yet feel the mortal wound</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Gentlefolks, fasten your seatbelts; we are now approaching an area of turbulence as we proceed through the event horizon directly into the alternate universe timeline.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Concurrent with (but departing from) the events of MTMTE #40.</p><p>"You were my crown;<br/>Now I'm in exile seeing you out<br/>I think I've seen this film before<br/>So I'm leaving out the side door..."</p><p>Soundtrack: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osdoLjUNFnA">Taylor Swift</a>, Exile</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>I woke up in the middle of Megatron’s defragmentation cycle to find myself surprisingly unrestrained. I supposed, given the depth of my unconsciousness at whatever time he had decided to allow himself to rest, that he had figured his arm thrown over me, and his body between me and the open side of the berth, would be enough to keep me in place. It amazed me, given how little of the recharge slab he was allowing himself to take up, that he could even be comfortable enough to recharge, let alone defrag.</p><p>Not for the first time, he’d underestimated me.</p><p>I knew, because I felt like I was floating still, that I could not trust my own sensorium. I felt no pain whatsoever. But I also knew that there was something I had to do. Something I’d done before. I had to steal a briefcase.</p><p>My self-repair routines informed me that I was capable of bearing my own weight on my limbs, though very little else. My subspace access capability was severely reduced, because most of the emptiness in my frame was thick with spongy, foaming protometal, and I knew better than to interfere with that.</p><p>Still, I was able to fold my shoulders in and slip out from under Megatron’s arm without waking him, because he was deep in defragmentation. And I could get over him and out of the berth, if I consciously overrode the instinct to put my legs underneath me before I landed and fall on my aft instead. I had just enough mass displacement capability left to do it silently. The painkillers did the rest of the job and made it bearable.</p><p>I am an outlier. It’s nothing as dramatic as Skywarp’s teleportation, or Soundwave’s ability to see the universe as synaesthetic streams of conflicting data (which is often more of a burden than a gift). It’s a lanthanum-positive spark. I am capable, when I so desire, of deflecting the attention even of machinery too stupid to be able to categorise a problem as ‘someone else’s’ as opposed to ‘mine’.</p><p>People think it's all in my cloaking harness, and I do have a fancy one, full of tiny attention-deflector circuits. But mostly what I use that for is to figure out if anyone's looking. All I really need is a lanthanum chip that I can attune to my spark and then put under my tongue. I'd been using them since I got on board, but I did have a few of them left. Astrosecs after I swallowed the thing, once it started to leach into my energon system, even Soundwave could look right at me and not see me. Since nobody else has touched my spark since the techs in Stanix had seated it in my protoform, I felt relatively secure in assuming that even Megatron wouldn’t be able to see me.</p><p>Consciously, I knew that I had never stolen a briefcase. I had too much self-respect and too much self-preservation ever to willingly fuck with anything belonging to Brainstorm without a direct order, and now that Megatron was a confirmed traitor, there was nobody on this entire fragging ship who could give me a direct order. Other than Ratchet by virtue of being my physician, and fortunately, he was not aware I was considering it. (He would definitely have said no.)</p><p>Autobots are terrible at security. The vents on the Lost Light were still not equipped with locks or pressure sensors. A pressure sensor wouldn’t have been able to register my exact mass under lanthanum cloak, but it would have registered <i>something</i> that could only have been myself or Skids. And Skids was not a Decepticon. I really wanted to have a laugh about this with Megatron, but since he was officially an Autobot now, I would’ve been running the risk that he’d tell someone.</p><p>The vents allowed me to get from the habsuite to a corridor near the storage area quickly. When people can’t see you, you have to walk very carefully through corridors. Lanthanum cloak gives you a chance of escaping their notice <i>even if they walk right into you</i>, but it doesn’t stop you from sustaining injuries, and I was not in any position to risk an impact injury of any kind.</p><p>Frag. Apparently someone <i>had</i> figured out to put pressure sensors into the vents that went directly into the area where all the briefcases were stored.</p><p>So I had to wait until someone tall enough passed under the vent, lightly drop onto their head without injuring any of my newly rebuilt limbs, and then skitter down them before they actually noticed, because people do notice the pressure if you stay on them too long. I have never been so grateful to see Nautica in all my life, and I have never been so pleased to cause someone so much consternation, even if I did just barely escape getting a weird space wrench to the face because I caught a claw on a piece of her kibble.</p><p>I probably should have mentioned at some point in this narrative that I’m an idiot. Then again, I think anyone bored enough to read this has probably figured that out by now.</p><p>Getting into the storeroom wasn’t as difficult as I had thought it would be; it was one I’d got into before, although there had been nothing particularly dangerous there the last time I’d got into it. It was dark, but I can see in the dark. I sniffed around, looking for clues that they’d been counted or tagged or any of the other things it would’ve made sense to do with them, but I didn’t find anything on them. They were just piled up like so much overstock. I was surprised that anyone had been able to stack them, because when I tugged one free of the stack with my teeth it felt like trying to eat ozone. Also, they were gross. Some kind of treated <i>skin</i> had been used to cover them.</p><p>I went out of the storeroom by a different entrance, and very nearly dropped the thing when I saw a pair of pedes outside the door. They were Megatron’s. He leaned over and took the briefcase out of my mouth and tucked it into a subspace, which I frankly didn’t think wise.</p><p>“Spit out the lanthanum, idiot.”</p><p>I considered asking him how I knew I was there, but…floating briefcase. I spat out the lanthanum and he took it.</p><p>“You’re lucky there aren’t any cameras here.”</p><p>“Not lucky,” I said. “Knowledgeable. I only had to get from that door to the vent right there. It’s even at ground level. I <i>did</i> live on this ship for a half year before anyone noticed.”</p><p>“Hm. Fortunate, since you can’t jump without doing yourself potentially irreparable harm,” Megatron said. “Why would you <i>want</i> that thing?”</p><p>I looked up at him. “Are you telling me you <i>don’t</i> want it?” I didn’t feel like telling him that for some reason that made no sense whatsoever, I had awakened from a deep recharge suffused with certainty that stealing that thing was necessary, and that it had to be stolen by no-one other than me, and right now.</p><p>Megatron scowled. “That’s not the point. Unless you intended to give it to me directly, and not to take it when you leave and go home to Soundwave.”</p><p>Normally I would have said something sarcastic and a little bit mean in response to an assumption like that, but the painkillers were starting to wear off and what came out of my mouth was not even remotely articulate.</p><p>Megatron leaned over, picked me up, and pressed a kiss to my forehead, then kissed down my nose and along the side of my muzzle. “You’re ridiculous,” he vented against my cheek, and I nuzzled his face, and while he distracted me, he snapped something back into the line that was still threaded into me. He’d wanted to become a medic, once, and he knew what he was doing.</p><p>The relief was too blissful for me to complain about, even when he threaded a thin cable into the line and queried my self-repair routines, which was <i>incredibly</i> intrusive and frankly something <i>Soundwave</i> wouldn’t have done without my permission unless I were very near death.</p><p>“Well. You have managed not to damage yourself, somehow. If I believed in any gods, I'd be thanking them that I don't have to explain whatever you might have done to yourself to Ratchet.” He snorted, softly. “You’re ridiculous,” he repeated, the sound of his voice going airless and quiet, “and I love you.”</p><p>I doubt he would have said that if I had been able to keep my optics open. I wasn't meant to hear it.</p><p>But I did.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0016"><h2>16. away from all the faults and fears you left behind</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>All he had to do to throw this thing was laugh.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Concurrent with (but departing from) the events of MTMTE #40.</p><p>"I know my call despite my faults and despite my growing fears<br/>But I will hold on hope and I won't let you choke on the noose around your neck<br/>And I'll find strength in pain and I will change my ways, I'll know my name as it's called again</p><p>Soundtrack: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNy8llTLvuA">Mumford and Sons</a>, The Cage</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Megatron walked into the medbay carrying Ravage, who was deep in drugged recharge. “Reporting for duty,” he quipped, as he helped Ratchet arrange the cougaraider in a bed.</p><p>Ratchet snorted. “I wouldn’t think he’d be lying comfortably on his back this quickly. He ever do that before?”</p><p>Megatron considered, briefly, asking Ratchet why he thought he would know the answer to that question, but finally just shrugged. “Never shared a berth with him before they cut him down, but I imagine so.”</p><p>“Don’t tell me he hasn’t been weight-bearing,” Ratchet said, scowling as he examined one of Ravage’s feet, “against my <i>express orders</i>.”</p><p>Megatron chuckled softly. He wasn’t about to take responsibility for that. “Your drugs wore off and he woke up during my defragmentation cycle. Not my fault you gave him his instructions when you’d already drugged him into a stupor. Anything damaged?”</p><p>“No.” Ratchet seemed somewhat mollified. “I can’t restrain him here if neither one of us is present; I don’t think there’s anyone else on the ship that he trusts. And no, that is not getting you out of going to the hearing.”</p><p>Megatron shrugged. “Knock him out. Frankly, he needs the rest. I can’t tell you how often I wake up and find him furiously writing when he ought to be recharging.”</p><p>“If he needs more rest, then you should let him have it—<i><b>Writing</b></i>?  Writing <i>what</i>?” Ratchet looked rather embarrassed at his own assumptions, and good for him.</p><p>“I don’t know <i>what</i> you think we’ve been doing, but you told me his consent was impaired at best,” Megatron drawled sweetly. “As for what he’s been writing? Not sure. He won’t show it to anyone, not even me, but from the bits I’ve seen, an angry attempt to rebutt the epilogue I just added to <i>Towards Peace</i>, some angry poetry about relationships he’s had, and a vicious parody of The Autobot Code that I’m trying to stop him from finishing by pointing out that if he does so, Ultra Magnus won’t be able to deny that he knows it.”</p><p>Megatron had expected that to get a laugh, but instead Ratchet glared at him. “He is <i>not</i> taking the Autobrand!”</p><p>
  <i>What.</i>
</p><p>“Of course not,” Megatron said smoothly. “We are still talking about my lovely amica, just to be sure? Because I’d think he’s made his feelings on that rather clear, and while I admit that I hoped for it once, I am quite aware it won’t happen. But I am rather surprised that <i>you</i> don’t hope for it.”</p><p>“Of all the—” Ratchet <i>glared</i> at him a second time.</p><p>“Yes?” Megatron was curious, which made him impatient.</p><p>“Explain to me how a couple of community organisers from the Dead End who barely made it alive out of debt slavery ended up as your chief spymaster and deadliest assassin? And don’t give me any slagash about how you came up out of the mines yourself. Those kids weren’t killers! They were just like Drift—”</p><p>The only reason Megatron refrained from laughing was that there was no point in it. “They absolutely <i>were</i>,” he said quietly. “Soundwave can kill people <i>accidentally</i> if he doesn’t control his sonic abilities, and Ravage…Ratbat purchased Ravage and the birds illegally because they <i>were</i> trained spies and killers. If that was not how Ravage incurred most of his injuries then, it’s probably because he was trained for that, and not the other things that Ratbat wanted. They were marked for recall, but the postnatal centre in Stanix was short of funding, so they were sold instead. Ravage doesn’t <i>love</i> killing, but that doesn’t mean he’s not an expert at it.” He ex-vented slowly. “Tell me, Doctor. What did you find when you looked at Ravage’s CNA?”</p><p>Ratchet sighed, deeply. <i>Gotcha.</i> Megatron smiled in unfeigned sympathy.</p><p>“A lot of Predacon coding,” Ratchet said with an unusually unhappy scowl. “I knew Ravage when he still had a bipedal form, and when I saw the CNA, I knew exactly why they deactivated the bipedal alt-coding when they put him into a cassette frame. That bipedal form is textbook Predacon.”</p><p>Megatron nodded, and made a small impatient gesture with his hand.</p><p>“And <i>that</i>,” Ratchet continued, “is one of the <i>reasons</i>…If I had my way, those kids—”</p><p>“Are now four million years older, just like the rest of us.” Megatron shrugged. “I understand that you are afraid for Ravage and have perhaps seen him nearly die <i>almost</i> as often as Knock Out and Hook have done. I will assure you once more that Ravage will not be joining our faction. But if you think that Ravage will go back to Soundwave and the two of them will then slip away into obscurity, please think again. It is possible that I may know them better than you, having spent considerably more time with both of them than you have, and in Soundwave’s case at least, more recently. And most importantly…Ravage is <i>not Drift</i>.”</p><p>“Fine!” Ratchet snapped, optics flaring as the low blow hit home. “But I’m not going to bring Ravage up at the hearing, and if you have a lick of sense in your helm, you won’t either.”</p><p>“Then why—?” Megatron was beginning to get irritated. “He did nearly die on your operating table <i>because</i> his existence was cut short in the opposing timeline.”</p><p>“Because I don’t think Brainstorm ever interacted with him, and may not know he’s here. When he gets back in touch with whoever his handlers are…he might just not tell them.” Ratchet rolled his optics. “If Ravage is really your amica, there will be plenty of opportunities for him to martyr himself on your behalf without him officially leaving or joining a faction.”</p><p>“The point of this entire painful and incapacitating exercise, which for some reason you decided had to take place <i>right fragging now</i>, was in fact for Ravage to make his own decisions, yes? Rather than having mechs he admires who think they know what’s best for him do it.” Megatron shrugged again. “We’re going to be late for the hearing if we don’t get moving. Tell First Aid not to annoy him too much and let’s…roll out.”</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>~*~*~*~</p>
</div>“…Brainstorm never supplied the Decepticons with information that could be used against the Autobots.”<p>For just a moment, time felt as though it were about to stop again.</p><p>Megatron knew that all he had to do to throw this thing was laugh. Out loud. Not a guffaw, just loud enough to be heard. Even if he said nothing else, the die would be cast. And Brainstorm had tried to kill him before he was kindled. Brainstorm’s actions would have got Ravage recalled, and Soundwave would have thrown his life away, and Orion…who knows. There would have been no revolution, and…seriously, frag the Galactic Council and all of those other people who would’ve been better off.</p><p>He’d come to understand that other lives were just as valuable as Cybertronian lives. But that didn’t mean that he could help loving his own species more, however pestilent it was as far as everyone else in the universe was concerned.</p><p>And yet.</p><p>He didn’t actually <i>know</i> what Brainstorm had given the Decepticons. Which meant that whatever it had been, it hadn’t been important enough to tell him about.</p><p>By the time he had almost made up his mind to go ahead and laugh, it was too late.</p><p>Because Brainstorm was telling the truth. He <i>wasn’t</i> responsible for all the carnage that his counterpart had likely caused. And bringing Rewind back hadn’t made him nearly as unpopular as he deserved to be, either. In the end…Megatron wasn’t sure why Ratchet had demanded that he come. His chair might just as well have been empty.</p><p>When the decision was announced—and it wasn’t one he liked, because Megatron could not admire incompetence as a defence (it was far too reminiscent of Starscream, for one thing)—Megatron saw Ratchet’s expression and shrugged. There was nothing else that he could have done, and been true to himself. There was nobody else he’d ever been true to, so he wasn’t going to give that up.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0017"><h2>17. some fifty years ago you wrote these words</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>As posted to <a href="https://tfwiki.net/wiki/The_Big_Conversation">The Big Conversation</a><br/>by @cybercatastrophe</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Wake up and kiss me;<br/>Tell us again how far we have come<br/>From the wall where arm-in-arm we sang<br/>In pain that gave us rage to rise.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0018"><h2>18. you'll find out soon enough on your own</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>As posted to <a href="https://tfwiki.net/wiki/The_Big_Conversation">The Big Conversation</a><br/>by banned user @unit-d-16</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>We sang together arm-in-arm until we couldn't, anymore.<br/>
And then I lost my footing on another wall<br/>
And now I write these words today.</p><p>There’s always another wall<br/>
As long as your body still lives there will always be pain<br/>
As long as life strives there will always be hunger<br/>
You can have kisses as long as I have them to give<br/>
But like everything else, they won’t last forever.</p><p>Ask yourself this: how many walls do you think you can climb without falling?<br/>
Then let me be the first one you scale.<br/>
Sink your claws in as far as they'll go and then run when you get to the top.<br/>
Run as far as you can.<br/>
When you can't run any further, get up and keep running.<br/>
Run with the breaking hearts of your lovers<br/>
Run with the songs of the people<br/>
Run with the fire you stole from the sparks of your enemies.</p><p>Don't worry about us, run on past your heart<br/>
Through the shining gate now lost to my eyes:<br/>
<br/>
My kisses won't get you there.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0019"><h2>19. open the lost city's gates from inside</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>It was a terrible idea.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Concurrent with (but departing from) the events of MTMTE #40.</p><p>"I miss the sound of your voice<br/>Loudest thing in my head<br/>And I ache to remember<br/>All the violent, sweet<br/>Perfect words that you said..."</p><p>Soundtrack: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHx4BlF6V2o">Matt Nathanson</a>, Come On Get Higher</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>I was sadly unsurprised that only three people came to the reading Megatron did after Brainstorm’s hearing. I knew a lot of people wouldn’t have the bandwidth for it after the last few days. So after he read his most recent work, we all ended up at a table together playing poetry rounds.</p><p>Once, this was a game for Senators and other members of the ruling castes—people who were actually given a real education, because they were intended to think and decide and question things. I had observed it working on the Senate floor, and reading classic literature when I hid in the libraries during my alleged free time. Orion Pax had known the game because he loved literature. Megatron hadn’t known there was a game the day we started playing it with him, but of course he took to it as if it were hardwired into his processor.</p><p>The rules are simple. Somebody starts the round with a poem. All the poems have to be short. Each person has to pick up on a theme from the previous person’s play. Usually people quote the classics, though I’ve seen it done with popular song lyrics among Decepticons. Megatron and I almost always play on hard mode: we only used our own stuff, and we often made it up extempore, though we never expected that from Orion or Soundwave. When someone can’t come up with a decent response, either the last person wins, or you keep on going until only one player’s left in the game.</p><p>In a group of mixed skill levels, you always allow for quotations, and keep it as light as you can. We were going just fine until a femme I didn’t know tried to riff off “Little One”.</p><p>There are several of Megatron’s poems that people who aren’t…well, like us…infamously misinterpret. Everyone who actually cares has heard by now that “Durasteel Slagger” is absolutely <i>not</i> about ‘being your best self’, because he made fun of that ridiculous interpretation in another poem entirely. “Little One” is not about an orphaned sparkling. If it were, it would be pure glurge, which Megatron doesn’t do. With a side of <i>pathologically disturbing</i>.</p><p>So between the painkillers which were starting to wear off, and the engex which was starting to sink in, I managed to produce the following response:</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>
    <i>The little one who purred in his arms was two million years old<br/>
And had opened the lost city’s gates from inside.</i>
  </p>
</div><p>
  <i></i>
</p><p>
  <i></i>
</p><p>Megatron choked on his drink. The strange femme <i>stared</i> at me. “Was that about <i>you</i>?”</p><p>“Sorry,” I said, but I’m sure that it showed on my face that I wasn’t at all. It was the last round, and I’d  won.</p><p>“Well,” he said after the rest of them left, “does this mean you no longer want to be discreet?”</p><p>“There has been nothing to be discreet about,” I retorted. “Unless you count lascivious talk and being a tease.”</p><p>“Did you perhaps intend to say that there has not been anything to be discreet about since the time we rescued Soundwave forty years ago?” His smile was very crooked and his optics were brimming over with mischief. “Because otherwise what you just said was <i>very</i> deceptive, little one.” He leaned over to rub his cheek against mine.</p><p>Then Mirage stalked over to the table. “Okay, that’s enough. The two of you need to stop running everyone else out of my bar, captain or no captain.” The look he gave me could roughly be translated as ‘look, I’m sorry it’s rough for people like you, but this is a business and too many people who come in here do not want to look at that.’</p><p>There were a lot of things that Megatron could have said at that moment. He didn’t say any of them. He dipped me back and kissed me thoroughly, taking his time about it, while Mirage stood there venting smoke, then picked me up and carried me out of the bar, taking the bottle of very expensive engex which we had not yet paid for.</p><p>“Ratchet said you really should stay off your feet as much as possible for the next few days,” he murmured into my audial as we passed Mirage, “but he said absolutely nothing about your back.”</p><p>I almost choked with the effort not to laugh, pressing my muzzle into his plate instead (while waving goodbye to Mirage, my paw delicately forming a very obscene gesture).</p><p>The metal bowl I drink from at Visages followed us out, making a series of sharp clangs as it arced through the hall and hit some poor mini I didn’t know. I wanted to ask if he was okay, but once he saw that he’d wandered into an argument containing Megatron, he moved so fast he Dopplered.</p><p>Megatron turned around very slowly, possibly just to glower at Mirage. “There are still ways I can make your life hell as a pacifist,” he grumbled. “Did you not just say you wanted to be rid of us? <i>I assure you</i> we’d rather be elsewhere.”</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>~*~*~*~</p>
</div><p>When we reached the habsuite the first thing he did was to pull out the recharge slab and lay me out on it.  I waited while he did his usual scan for potential problems, a little nervous because I knew I could do it better if I could stand up on my own four feet. On the other hand…I was perfectly happy to lie there, open my panel and let out some of the heat that had been building up in there.</p><p>It was a <i>terrible idea</i>. It was something we’d both been wanting probably as long as he’d known I was there.</p><p>It was something Soundwave might not forgive me for (but probably would, unless he’d decided not to forgive me at all). It was something I’d been thinking about, albeit guiltily, since I’d sneaked on board, because I’m not even a little bit in romantic love with him, but sometimes just the <i>smell of him</i> charges me up, and when he’s manic, he’s hypersexual, and that has made him very, very good at this.</p><p>I really didn’t want Ultra Magnus to hear about this, because I was pretty sure that they liked each other and I wanted him to have someone who might protect him if things went wrong. But after the show he’d made of screwing with Mirage, the entire crew was probably going to know within a breem.</p><p>And then his fingertip was on my outermost valve node and the rest of his fingers were thrusting in and out of me and he looked down at me and said, “Do you know? I think I might actually be able to hilt my spike in you now. Would you like to find out, my little one?”</p><p>I did, very much, want to find out. I was already starting to feel some of the aches in my limbs again, but the ache in my valve more than cancelled that out, and the delicate lick he gave the node he'd been teasing as he pulled me up into a sitting position was more than sufficient pain relief for everything else. He sat down next to me on the slab, opened his panel, and grinned at the noise I made when I saw how once more how big that spike actually was. Then he helped me into his lap, and eased me down onto him. It didn’t go in all the way—not at first.</p><p>But the noise <i>he</i> made when he felt me open up for him caused me to ex-vent excess heat, and suddenly everything else opened up all at once, and I just sort of slid down onto him. It only hurt a little, and in the most delicious way.</p><p>And then, his arms tightened around me, and for a little while, we just <i>stayed</i> like that. “Can I have your spark?” he murmured into my audial.</p><p>I didn’t want to disappoint him, and I knew I was about to—bitterly. But I couldn’t do it.</p><p>“I’ve only ever done that with <i>one person</i>,” I said, looking up at him with tears in my eyes. “It feels wrong.”</p><p>The way he smiled when I said that made me really wish I could. It was sad, but there was also something weirdly happy in it. “I understand,” he said gently, and kissed the top of my head. “I am glad that you still have that, and I don’t…I don’t <i>really</i> want to take it from you.” Even if he kind of did. “I will not ask you again. But be warned: if you ask me, I will not be able to refuse you.”</p><p>Then he started to rock with me, hitting my utmost anterior node and all the ones linked up with it with each roll of his hips, and I stopped thinking about disappointing him, though the sadness stayed with me until the charge began to build.</p><p>“You’re holding back,” I said, floating dreamily on the waves of pleasure.</p><p>“Hmm. Yes. You did just have surgery recently, and I think you’re going to be here a while.” He laughed very softly. “I won’t hold back forever. Promise.”</p><p>“I’ll hold you to that,” I murmured, even as I felt him slip some cabling into my access ports. He was querying my self-repair systems again, and I couldn’t help laughing a little. “You’re really worried about me.”</p><p>“I’ve been through this, remember? I was big before but they made me bigger, too. It’s harder than going smaller, for some reason.” His field wrapped around mine and shut everything else out, and the sensors in close contact, linked by films of lubricant and rolling motion, began to set up a feedback loop, so I could feel what it was like to be engulfed in me, and he could better calibrate each motion. It was <i>ridiculously</i> gentle and precise, and I was making some of the most strangled and unlovely noises I have ever made, and they were rocking his emotional subsystems into override. “Come, little one. Over the edge. I promise to catch you.”</p><p>The waves were going tidal. We had never ‘faced like this before. Soundwave cherished me like this, but Megatron had never made me feel so loved before.</p><p>“Come,” he whispered. “You’ll carry me through.” He swivelled a little, <i>just so</i>, and I did, three times in rapid succession and yowling loud enough to raise the dead. He overloaded on the second one. Then he held me like that till his spike completely depressurised. After that, he laid me out and swung the rest of himself out on the slab alongside me.</p><p>“Lovely,” he said, and kissed me. I was exhausted, and absolutely fine with him having held back.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0020"><h2>20. brother you fade out slow</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>1. Go to the Pit.<br/>2. Find Unicron.<br/>3. Eat his spike.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Concurrent with (but departing from) the events of MTMTE #40.</p><p>"You treat me like a lie<br/>That you use when you lose control<br/>And everything in this house goes away<br/>A story line that was bound to break."</p><p>Soundtrack: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6Bn9i_J59s">Kathleen Edwards</a>, Hard on Everyone</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>My offer still stands, Soundwave.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>~*~*~*~</p>
</div><p>Tell everyone what I did. I will tell everyone that you tried to blackmail me into taking your brand. You’d be surprised how much Decepticons understand about necessity and hard choices. Or follow this set of simple instructions:</p><p>1. Go to the Pit.<br/>
2. Find Unicron.<br/>
3. Eat his spike.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>~*~*~*~</p>
</div><p>I’m not talking about your cold-blooded murder this time.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>~*~*~*~</p>
</div><p>Really. That? You should be more used to it than I am.<br/>
Do you ever consider how many of these things might never have happened if you hadn’t been a traitor, Orion?</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>~*~*~*~</p>
</div><p>I suppose cassette controls aren't as powerful as they're reputed to be.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>~*~*~*~</p>
</div><p>=End Transmission=</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0021"><h2>21. even I might accept such a judgement</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>"You'd question his axioms, not just his postulates."</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Interlude between the (AU) events of MTMTE #40 and #41</p><p>"Hello, goodbye--higher you fly into the world<br/>I awoke this morning, with pouring rain in my heart<br/>As I fall apart today<br/>But you make your way, and I'll rise<br/>I will rise if in my mind<br/>But I can see you fly away<br/>I can see the sun upon your face<br/>I can feel your heart and I can hear you cry<br/>And as I fall apart I learn to fly<br/>A dirty bird like me will learn to fly..."</p><p>Soundtrack: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmdqHPEpDR4">Carbon Leaf</a>, Learn To Fly</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>I came back online to find Megatron sitting beside me on the recharge slab, reading. “Aren’t you supposed to be on the bridge?”</p><p>“Ratchet left,” Megatron said quietly, and set the book aside. “How much do you hurt, right now?”</p><p>I stretched. “I feel fine,” I said, and then suddenly I didn’t; my shoulder and hip joint assemblies were on fire, and I crumpled against him.</p><p>“I thought not,” he said, gentle and unsurprised. “Lie still.”</p><p>“Like I’m going to do anything else,” I grumbled, and felt a sharp pinch in one of my coolant lines. “Should we have been fragging last night?” Whatever it was spread out through me, cold and numbing and soothing.</p><p>“It’s an unconventional therapy,” he said fondly, “but I plugged into you deeply enough to make sure that nothing we did exceeded your tolerances, and I know you remember I queried your self-repair systems. Flooding your system with pleasurable stimuli certainly did you no harm. You forget that while I’m not a medic, I have significantly more knowledge of medical engineering than most lay people do.”</p><p>I looked up at him. “Wait. Did you say Ratchet left? As in gone?” I couldn’t help feeling betrayed, and it was a feeling I was growing very tired of. He didn’t owe it to me to stay on the Lost Light, but he could’ve fragging well warned me he was going to leave, instead of insisting that everything had to be done right now, if I wanted it done by him.</p><p>“He left detailed instructions for your care, just in case I don’t trust anyone else with you. Which I don’t. They did not arrive until approximately three breems after we left the planet without him aboard.” Megatron looked down at me, smiling wryly. “I guess he didn’t think I’d need to ask any questions. Good thing he was right, hmm? Though nothing we did last night was in the instructions.”</p><p>“I should hope not!” I couldn’t help laughing. “Don’t tell me you did that <i>just</i> for my health.”</p><p>“Not <i>just</i> yours,” he said as he helped me stretch out. “I cannot imagine a universe in which it’s conducive to <i>anyone’s</i> mental health for either or both of us to remain frustrated long. Especially yours and my own.”</p><p>I rolled my optics at him, but I was perfectly happy to lie there and let him manipulate my field. Despite the topic of the conversation, I didn’t feel the least bit sexy, and neither did his ministrations. He was completely focused on my healing process. “You can’t tell me Rodimus is letting you off bridge duty to play nurse.”</p><p>“If something I actually need to be physically present on the bridge for comes up, I will go to the bridge. Otherwise, I’m working remotely today.”</p><p>“People will think we’re in love,” I said as he got up so that I could stretch out completely.</p><p>“There are worse things they could think,” said Megatron. “I’m afraid we made a spectacle of ourselves last night.”</p><p>I’d sort of known that, but there hadn’t been a lot of witnesses. “In front of three fans of your poetry, a terrified mini, and…”</p><p>“Mirage,” we said, in unison.</p><p>“Don’t think I’ve reconciled myself to your position,” I grumbled into the pillow he slipped under my head. “The revolution isn’t over and it won’t be over as long as strange femmes think they can pat me on the head and Mirage can throw me out of his bar for not even kissing you yet. People are still being deceived…and I don’t think you should be helping their deceivers.”</p><p>“You’re not entirely wrong,” he said softly. “But it’s more complicated than you know.”</p><p>I growled this time. “Deceivers always say that. Don’t become one.”</p><p>His hands stopped mid-adjustment. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”</p><p>Those words have never set well in his mouth, but I found that I liked them this time. “Orion wrote that speech. I recognise his cadences.” I closed my eyes. “He’s a much worse orator than you. It must have galled you not to be able to say what he meant you to say in your own words. You’d have left loopholes, wouldn’t you have?”</p><p>Megatron ex-vented, then went back to working me over, albeit in a very different way from the night before. “So did Orion. He just didn’t intend to. But I won’t take advantage.”</p><p>“I think you should.”</p><p>“I know,” he replied, as his thumbs set at the base of my skull—something I would not have tolerated from anyone else except Soundwave or maybe Ratchet, due to the risk—and somehow slipped it back into an alignment I hadn’t known it was out of. A lot of trapped energy whooshed out of my head down my spinal column, and the headache I hadn’t even known I was nursing just died. It wasn’t sexual, and yet the only thing I could compare it to was one of the yowling orgasms he had drawn out of me just as gently the previous night. “You don’t believe in the rule of law.”</p><p>“Rules in a book can be twisted around by the strong to mean anything they want them to mean,” I muttered, slightly irritated that this conversation, which was so important, had to happen now and interrupt the bliss of that release. “I trust people.”</p><p>“Yes.  Yes, I know.  How trustworthy was I when I threatened to take Glit’s hands off? So trustworthy that you gave yourself to me while I was threatening your kith,” he said, answering his own question. “You could have <i>talked</i> me out of it, but you were too afraid to risk it. You have said, now and before, that you <i>chose</i> to do that. Soundwave doesn’t see it that way. It’s probably one of the reasons he wants me dead, and if I didn’t think that letting him kill me would hurt you just as much as using you like that, I might let him. But I won’t let you. He’s the one who wants to strike the blow. Even if it’s out of rage over what I did to you, it’s his blow, not yours.”</p><p>He pressed his fingers into the spot on my spine where my hips had formerly been connected, and did the same thing he’d just done, with exactly the same results. Then once more where my hips now sat, lower down on what had once been a part of my now-foreshortened tail.</p><p>I was worried about how that would affect my balance, but I’d been told the tail could be lengthened later if it needed to be, and I couldn’t argue with <i>Ratchet</i> that using spine I already had was not the safest option. I just wondered who in the Pit he’d thought would be doing the lengthening.</p><p>And then I realised where Megatron was getting some of this.</p><p>“You,” I growled through waves of platonic bliss. “You’ve been reading <a href="#section0012">what I wrote</a>. <i>That wasn’t meant for anyone else to see</i>, just so you know, since you’re suddenly so sure you know more about what I have consented to than I do myself.”</p><p>“No? You left that datapad on my desk. Are you sure you weren’t doing that thing you do? The one where you won’t say what you want, so you don’t have to be responsible if people give you what you want and you don’t like it?” He rested his hand at the new base of my spine until the nodes there stilled. “It’s still on me for taking what you didn’t actually offer me,” he said, “but it’s not the best consent practise on your end, either.”</p><p>“You should apologise,” I muttered, though there was a sneaky little thought process that suggested he maybe was right. Which I terminated with extreme prejudice.</p><p>“And I would, if I were truly sorry.” He ex-vented. “I am sorry that I threatened Glit. And I am sorry that I let you frag me when you were afraid for his life, because I do believe that even though it was your idea, it was <i>not</i> what you wanted to do. But I’m not sorry that I read your words. I don’t agree with all of them, but I believe they should be heard. I might enjoy watching you and Ultra Magnus debate almost as much as I enjoyed last night.”</p><p>“He’d slaughter me and you know it.” I snorted. “Don’t even try to deny it.”</p><p>“I don’t think so,” Megatron said. He got up to drag his desk chair next to the slab and sit down in it. “In an argument with you, there’d be no referring to the law books. He’d have to argue with you about the very nature of law, and you’d say things he wouldn’t see coming, because you’d question his axioms, not just his postulates.”</p><p>I lay there quietly for a little while, processing what he’d just said, and letting all the trapped energy that he’d released settle back into circulation. I remembered him doing something very similar last night while he was inside of me, and how much it had added to my pleasure in it. I’d thought he was only holding me close because my thinking mind had gone offline. It was alarming how I’d built up all those knots just while <i>resting</i>, because I’d been nothing but loose and open when he’d finished with me.</p><p>“You’re right that letting me do that was abusive,” I conceded, and felt some other tension, nothing physical, that I had not even known was present unclench and release inside of me. “And you’re even more right that threatening Glit was abusive. But we had laws when the Senators did things like that every day and they didn’t stop any of that. As you’d have been first to point out once.”</p><p>“So what should you and Soundwave have done? We know what I shouldn’t have done. But without a law, what should the two of you have done? In the empire of unsheathed blades, you should have done whatever it took to save your kith, <i>which you did</i>, at great cost to yourself. What should Soundwave have done to protect you both? Kill me? That’s what I would have said once.”</p><p>“How would I know?  I could say he should have taken your throne, but I don't know what he was feeling then. He could've stopped me, after all. We could have all just stopped you. I’m sure, by the time you were that far gone, that he could’ve raised enough support to lock you up, not forever in a cage, but long enough to see reason. But I didn't want him to do any of those things, I just wanted to stop you from doing something that even you would regret. To my friend.” I ex-vented. “It’s not exactly fair of you to try and argue with me about the rule of law when you’ve just put me through three more overloads, even if they <i>were</i> all platonic.”</p><p>Megatron laughed. “You might be drowsy, but your head’s much clearer. Isn’t that why you fragged me back then, to pull me out of my own aft? The only conversations we have that are better than the ones we have before we ‘face are the ones we have right after, when we might be exhausted, but we’re also very clear.”</p><p>I shrugged. “Am I going to need this kind of treatment every morning, and for how long? Don’t get me wrong, I’d a thousand times rather you do this than Ratch, because my field responds to your hands with zero resistance. Even though I am quite righteously annoyed that he didn’t warn me he was planning to abandon us. And I could never let First Aid. But. You have work to do.”</p><p>“Not for more than a few days. Your protoform’s still growing inside your new frame. It unseats things. It’s also rather malleable.” He grinned at me. “Soundwave will thank me for making sure you’ve been properly dilated when he whips out the other cannon.”</p><p>I may have hit him with a pillow. I may have been a lot more alert than I’d given myself credit for, now that everything was back in place. Then I looked him straight in the optics. “You think I’m going to go back?”</p><p>“I think you’d have opened your spark chamber up if you thought you weren’t,” he said, and handed me a cube of medical-grade. “As with my life expectancy, I will take what I’m given and be grateful. There are five people I’ve truly loved in all my life, and the first one died before I met the rest of you. I’m glad that one of you, at least, is still speaking to me.”</p><p>“There could be six,” I told him, very seriously, and drained the cube. He handed me a second one. “There could be eight. Soundwave and I are not the only people in the multiverse who could love you for everything that you are and nothing you're not, and Orion never managed it, no matter what you thought then or now. We’re just the only ones who ever have. All I want is for you to live long enough to meet the others.”</p><p>“I hope for that, too. But it’s not my decision.”</p><p>I winced. “Putting you into a cage or taking your life is a waste. They should <i>sentence</i> you to be Lord Protector of Cybertron, and the rest of us along with you, to clean up all the messes we made. Even I might accept such a judgement.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0022"><h2>22. the empire is not yet real, but it could be</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>As posted to <a href="https://tfwiki.net/wiki/The_Big_Conversation">The Big Conversation</a><br/>by @cybercatastrophe</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Chances are, you are being deceived…but it’s not enough to understand how others have deceived you. You also have to understand how you become complicit in your own deception.</p><p>There are animals—mechanical and organic alike—which have the quality of <i>sentience</i>. They have emotions. They love their young and their mates. But they do not have civilisation.</p><p>There are animals—mechanical and organic alike—with a degree of <i>intelligence</i>. They solve problems. They remember individuals and actions. They hold grudges. They can use items they find around them as tools. But they do not have civilisation.</p><p>Nonsapient animals use objects around them as weapons and tools. They do not invent crossbows or blasters or nuclear weapons. They don’t imagine cities and build them. They don’t look up at the stars and figure out how to get there. They cannot conceive of what does not exist. They convey information to one another, but they do not lie. They are not morally superior because they are truthful. They don’t choose not to lie. They can’t.</p><p>What makes us people, and allows us to create new things, is the ability to imagine things that do not exist and describe them to others. Imagination and lying, deception and creativity, belief and religion: these are the things that make us sapient.</p><p>If you ever doubt whether a species is sapient, ask yourself this: can they lie? Can they ‘believe’ in things that they can neither see nor hear nor feel nor taste? Can they distinguish between the world as it is, and the world they would like it to be?</p><p>And if they can, then you must also be aware that some of them will be seduced by visions of things that are not, because they want to believe them so badly.</p><p>In order to lie, to invent, to tell stories, to build things that haven’t existed before, you must be able to imagine a world in which things that you know to be untrue could be true. You must be able to see the world as it is, and also as it isn’t, and you must be able to communicate the world that isn’t to others as if it existed.</p><p>But we also like comfort. So we like to tell ourselves stories about the world that make us feel safe and comfortable. We hurt when we see others suffering, so we want to tell ourselves that they deserve it, so we can believe it won’t happen to us if we try to do everything right.</p><p>When you look at the world and see what it could be, do you try and figure out how to get there from here, or do you tell yourself that it is better than it is because that’s what you want to be true?</p><p>To be a Decepticon, you have to be able to accept that the world can be beautiful, but is not innately just or merciful. To be a Decepticon, you have to be able to look at the world and see what it could be, without allowing yourself to be seduced by the comforting lie that justice already exists. It’s painful to face how unjust the universe actually is. We want to live in a just world, but we have to admit that we don’t, and we never have, and that justice must be invented and refined by sapient beings.</p><p>Those who use their strength to take more than their share of power and resources always tell the same stories when asked to explain themselves. They want you to believe that they will protect you. They won’t. They want you to believe that the way things are is as it should be. They want you to believe that your oppression is the price you pay for safety, but they do not tell you that the safety you are paying for is theirs. They want you to believe that it is just for them to sit in judgement of people whose lives are entirely unlike their own.</p><p>They will tell you it’s complicated and you can’t understand it. If someone in authority says that, and they’re not talking about interdimensional physics or CNA analysis or some other field of study that takes centuries to learn, they’re lying.</p><p>You can’t improve upon reality when you don’t even understand it, and you will make mistakes, and they will hurt people, and you will have to make amends and move on. If you are a Decepticon, chances are you have already been in a situation where none of your choices were good and you ended up fragging everything up, only to realise that you were put into that situation by the thoughtless and/or malicious choices of others—and you’ve had to take responsibility for the choices you made, but also the choices that others made for you. And you absolutely have to keep  both of those sets of facts in your mind, all the time remembering that that was how it was, but it should not have been that way, and determine to do whatever is in your power to change the world, even if it's only picking up one rock at a time.</p><p>I loved Megatron of Tarn. I still do. He was and is a great mech, but now he is deceiving himself. Like so many others among us, he got distracted by the differences between organic and mechanical sapience, and he allowed himself to believe that because he was one of a very few people who saw the truth and were able to speak it, he knew more about it than anyone else could know. And now that he’s seen the evil he’s done, he’s blind to everything else he did.</p><p>He thinks he cannot see the empire of truth shining above and beyond us all anymore. I have told him, and I will tell you; the empire is not yet real, but it could be. We can find it within ourselves, and we can share it with everyone else.</p><p>It is not time to stand down. It is time to rise up and rise above what we have allowed ourselves to become. It is not time for war. It is time for making amends, and also for understanding how so many of us who had only known pain and oppression did not know how to do justice or kindness.</p><p>There are those of us who remain undeceived. If Megatron wants to give up the revolution, he can do that.</p><p>But it still belongs to us.</p><p>And if Orion Pax--yes, that was his name, when I knew him--wants me to "reintegrate" he'll have to convince me I was ever integrated into a society that chose to treat me as an animal and make me a slave in the first place.</p>
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<a name="section0023"><h2>23. the long-unburied dead</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>"Deflector shields firmly engaged, I see."</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Interlude between the (AU) events of MTMTE #40 and #41</p><p>"Hail to your dark skin<br/>Hiding the fact you're dead again<br/>Underneath the power lines seeking shade..."</p><p>Soundtrack: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqMbZY_iv6E">The Shins</a>, Caring is Creepy</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Don’t drink that.” Megatron took the half-empty energon cube I had been about to pick up, drained it, making a face, and put a full one, cold and clear, into my hand. I could have taken it; he was moving slower than usual, and had been all the time we’d been here, but if he really wanted that one, he could have it.</p><p>I set down my datapad and drank deeply. I’d forgotten to fuel for most of the day.</p><p>“Don’t drink my fuel,” he said, his rich voice dripping with amusement. “However much fun it is to stalk my fuel, you’re still supposed to be on medical-grade.”</p><p>“When do I get off it?” I knew he wouldn’t allow himself anything other than the standard rations the rest of the crew got, but he almost never had the candies and snacks that I used to steal from him on his throne now and again. Sometimes, especially during the years when Soundwave was missing and neither of us had anyone else, he even fed them to me. It had annoyed Starscream particularly. And he hadn’t touched the bottle of engex we’d taken.</p><p>Megatron laughed. “What, don’t you like it?”</p><p><i>Everyone</i> likes medical-grade. It’s pure and crisp, and it doesn’t have much of a flavour, but you run clean and hard on it. And he was very carefully not looking into my optics.</p><p>I closed them and sniffed the air. The cube he’d been drinking from smelled wrong. And there were other things that had been bothering me for a while. “You’re a slag liar,” I told him flatly. “Is there a reason First Aid acts like he’s doing us both a huge favour by not making me drink this in front of him when he brings it here?”</p><p>Megatron leaned back in his chair and studied me. “Leave it alone,” he said sharply, in a tone of voice I hadn’t heard for a very long time. I knew it very well; I wasn’t pleased that it had reappeared, and I knew better than to push.</p><p>“Later,” I told him, in a voice he knew was equally implacable. We were <i>going</i> to talk about his odd-smelling fuel. If only because I’d look him straight in the eye and threaten to ask Rodimus in front of as many people as possible why he was being poisoned, and he damned well knew I was capable of doing just that. But I didn’t feel ready to go there. Yet.</p><p>Megatron pulled a datapad out from under the bottom of the stack on his desk. “Here. I promised Ratchet I’d give this to you while you were out cold. At the time I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t just tell you about it himself, but he didn’t think you should know until your protoform began to settle down again.”</p><p>“Deflector shields firmly engaged, I see.” I took the datapad anyway. If he was going to distract me, at least he’d done me the favour of providing an alternate topic that was actually worthy of my attention. The information was <i>very</i> distracting. And also confusing.</p><p>“I’m not a medic, and I never did any of the self-study you’ve done,” I reminded Megatron, pushing our chairs together .“I don’t know how to read this. If you won’t explain how you’ve come to be so weirdly possessive about your fuel, you’d better at least explain <i>this</i>, because it is absolutely my business or Ratchet wouldn’t have instructed it be given to me.”</p><p>Megatron’s heavy arm draped lazily around my shoulders, and the weight was comforting. I leaned into him in spite of my better sense. He smelled good, too; even with that faint scent of lemony anise, which I found completely disgusting, wafting around from the empty cube on his desk. I indulged myself and batted the thing across the room. It hit a wall and shattered with a shimmery, satisfying noise. I could still smell lemon and anise, but now it did not overwhelm his clean diesel smell, or the lovely pheromones that made me want to fall into his arms (and sometimes right onto his spike). He laughed very softly, a rumbling chuckle that I felt spread through me from the arm against my shoulders. “You really are adorable when you let yourself do things like that.”</p><p>“I think you should tell me what all of this means,” I said, returning my attention forcibly to the medical documents. “And do it while we both have our panels and accesses closed.”</p><p>He laughed again, patting my shoulder awkwardly—but absolutely didn’t move into a more collegial distance. “Ratchet and I figured a lot of this out together,” he began, a bit nervously. “I had records from the Stanix postnatal centre. I paid a lot for them. But they were confusing. After this time travel business, though…I think they refer to spark experiments.”</p><p>I looked up at him. He’d told me quite a bit about Roddy’s Excellent Adventure Through History With Brainstorm; in fact, he’d told me enough to make me seriously rethink having stolen that damned briefcase. “Well, that’s not alarming at all, or even a little bit. Seriously.”</p><p>Megatron put one fingertip on my lips. “Don’t be alarmed. This changes nothing about who you are. You’re still the person you were before you knew this. Wherever your spark came from, and whatever they may have done to it…it’s the same spark that burned in you yesterday, and every day since they seated it in your protoform.”</p><p>He kissed my forehead. “The only thing this changes is that now we know a little more about why your early life was such a mess.” He picked up my energon cube and pressed it into my hands. I drank the rest of it down. “You, Laserbeak, Buzzsaw, and Stalker were prototypes, and you were meant to be destroyed. But the postnatal centre was underfunded, so they sold you to Ratbat.”</p><p>“You’ve told me that. What do we know now that we didn’t know before Ratchet sequenced my CNA?” I asked him.</p><p>Megatron nodded, and opened up an image on the datapad: a black, bipedal feliform, with wheels on his shoulders and ankles, where I had them now. He was a lot bulkier than I was; his shoulders and thorax were very nearly triangular. I was finding it easier and easier to move bipedally, to the point where sometimes I only thought to go on all fours when I needed to run.</p><p>He was handsome, but I didn’t really want to look like that. I didn’t want my shoulders to be that broad, or my body to be so…thick.</p><p>“This is your ancestor, Tripredacus Feliformata. You’re already starting to look a lot like him, but we don’t have Predacon sentio metallico lying around anymore. So they had to use a protoform type that already existed. You’ll never be as big and strong as he is. There are plenty of strong bots. They wanted to revive his agility, dexterity, speed, and sensory acuity. The only protoform type with the necessary full-spectrum sensory acuity is the one they normally use for specialists in entertainment and…hospitality,” he said, with a disgusted little snort; we both knew what that meant, and neither of us thought any less of someone who chose that function, but most of the people who had done that work when I was young hadn’t chosen it. </p><p>“Well,” I said, “I guess <i>that</i> was creative.”</p><p>“So, they took that protoform, and they imprinted it with a significant portion of this individual’s CNA. Your frame isn’t nearly as broad, because you’d never grow into it. You’re almost done filling out, as it is. Or haven’t you noticed how much less often I actually have to reseat things?” Megatron smiled at me, and tipped up my chin. “You know, I hope, that you are just as beautiful as you have always been. Perhaps more so.”</p><p>“I’m getting clumsier every day,” I complained, because I was, and I <i>hated</i> it.</p><p>“You’ll get your grace back once you’re used to your shorter tail and your new centre of gravity, and you’ll be everything you can be. I don’t think anything could be more beautiful,” Megatron said quietly. “You looked a lot like this before, except you didn’t have the wheels. And a lot of people thought you were beautiful.” He glanced away from me for a moment. “Soundwave certainly will. Don’t you remember what you looked like the first time I saw you, at that house party, up on the barricades, during the riots?”</p><p>Those words. They warmed my heart, because I wanted them to be true, and I knew they were. But I also knew that they were painful for him to say. And that Soundwave would think I was gorgeous even if I’d undergone empurata.</p><p>“So I’m…a Predacon?” The Predacons had all died out long ago, and they had looked like beastformers, and that was all I knew about them. This all still felt weird and unreal.</p><p>“As close as anyone currently living could ever be,” Megatron said. “Along with all the other Cougaraiders.”</p><p>“Howlback, Glit, and Stripes too?”</p><p>Megatron winced when I mentioned Glit, but he nodded. “Yes. And the birds, as well, I suspect, though we don’t have their CNA sequences. Laserbeak, Buzzsaw, Garboil, Sundor…I don’t know what protoforms they would’ve used for them, but we can find out. When you go, I want you to take this to Soundwave.”</p><p>“All right,” I said. There wasn’t any point in arguing with him about it. It would just prolong the hurt. “I’m not going to stop going quad completely, am I?”</p><p>Megatron shook his head. “No. I don’t think so. But you’re getting more and more comfortable on two legs every day, and that’s to be expected.”</p><p>“Oh scrap I’m hot.” I shook my head.</p><p>“You haven’t <i>ever</i> not been,” he informed me loftily, and then he kissed me. “But it’s a miracle any of you have integrated personalities. They took CNA designed to produce two people with wildly different personalities and temperaments and fused it to produce you: a deadly and efficient hunter, spy, saboteur and assassin who almost never fails to bring his quarry down, yet is also a sleek, lithe, gracious hedonist who loves to soothe and ease bad tempers, drape herself across the laps of powerful mechs and be adorned with jewels and kisses. Neither one of them was supposed to be a brilliant poet or a fiercely intellectual ethicist, but Functionalism is garbage.”</p><p>I burst out laughing. I knew he meant well, but that was one of the most ridiculous things he had ever said to me. “I’ve been hunting as a femme! And I was not a femme in any way the day I draped myself across your throne in order to be made to pay the tribute. This is almost as silly as the time you asked me whether being a femme had any impact on whether I wanted to spike or be spiked,” I said, rolling my eyes.</p><p>“I just wondered whether there were any parallels with organic biology. Apparently not.” Megatron shrugged. “Unsurprising. The point is, you have somehow managed to become an integrated personality, despite two warring sets of instincts.”</p><p>“I don’t know,” I said after a moment. “But let’s stop discussing my gender now and set it aside until I understand it myself. I’m pretty sure that’s not why they were so scared of me that every single one of us ended up inside a cassette, even the ones from the batches they <i>didn’t</i> think they fragged up. I know it was partially Ratbat’s petty revenge—to make sure I knew that even if he gave me to Soundwave, I’d never be completely free to give or withhold myself, no matter how much we loved each other—but that alone doesn’t explain why that happened to the rest of them, especially the ones that Soundwave never met.”</p><p>Megatron ex-vented. “No,” he said. “No, it certainly doesn’t.”</p><p>I looked back at the image again. “Howlback’s always a femme,” I mused, “but she’d still enjoy looking like that.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0024"><h2>24. frag the police (but not the way we did)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>As posted to <a href="https://tfwiki.net/wiki/The_Big_Conversation">The Big Conversation</a><br/>by @cybercatastrophe</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>do you ever remember the moment the universe stopped<br/>
once, when you weren’t afraid to be loved<br/>
and allowed you to kiss me?</p><p>it’s been four million years<br/>
and you still wear your blast mask the same way my spark-mate does</p><p>sometimes I wonder what would have happened<br/>
if we had owned all our perversions and lived them to fullness<br/>
if we had been true to our love of each other</p><p>it’s been four million years<br/>
and I still remember the day that you bought matching helm crests</p><p>do you ever remember the night when the stars fell out of the sky<br/>
and you took me into your arms, just that once,<br/>
like I was the same kind of being as you?</p><p>it’s been four million years<br/>
and you still use my amica’s words to condemn him</p><p>do you ever just look at the footage from all of those interviews<br/>
the ones where you said stupid things<br/>
like, you don’t really have time for a partner? you just never found the right one?</p><p>it’s been four million years<br/>
and I hate you the most when I miss you.</p><p>do you ever wonder if maybe you could have remembered who started the killing<br/>
you might have been able to get your spark-mate to listen<br/>
when we could not?</p><p>I’ve done all I can, but I can’t be enough for them both too much longer<br/>
I have to be just as true as you couldn’t be</p><p>I wonder, if you had remained undeceived:<br/>
would we have broken less and built much more?</p><p>or maybe they just would've killed us all.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0025"><h2>25. with pangs that conquer trust</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>You and I are stars not yet gone into the night.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Concurrent with and departing from the events of MTMTE #41</p><p>"Those eyes used to know me, it's been way too long<br/>You are the moon and the stars, and all they gaze upon<br/>Time won't ever move slowly, what you waiting on?<br/>What you waiting on?</p><p>We used to be giants--when did we stop?<br/>Say the word and I'll be yours, you know I never forgot..."</p><p>Soundtrack: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fi33qkv4Bjw">Dermot Kennedy</a>, "Giants"</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Why do <b>I</b> have to go to this thing?” When I’d first heard there was a party and the entire crew was going except for the captains, my first thought had been that this was a stupid idea, and my second thought was that I hadn’t just recovered from painful major surgery in order to go and hang out with a famous dying Autobot and dance with a crowd of wild strangers.</p><p>“I don’t suppose ‘because I said so’ would work?” Megatron ventured.</p><p>I answered him with a hiss, roughly translatable as ‘you may be my amica, benefits notwithstanding, but I don’t take orders from Autobots.’ Then I had my third thought, which was that this was an incredible opportunity to get ourselves off the List and back where we <i>both</i> belonged.</p><p>Megatron and I had plenty to talk about, even if we didn’t take advantage of this incredible opportunity, which I thought would be pretty stupid of us.</p><p>We still hadn’t talked about the energon he was drinking.</p><p>Megatron had distracted me valiantly. First he’d bowled me over with the truth of my own biological identity. The next few times I tried to start the conversation, he distracted me with blue energon gummies dusted with selenaldehyde and flecks of clear mica, followed by a diamond collar he must have been hiding somewhere for months, and finally by tying me up with colourful ropes that were far more decorative than restraining, which he used to get me into a position we’d normally have needed a third person’s help even to attempt.</p><p>These distractions, together and separately, were all amazing. They also did nothing whatsoever to assuage my fear that he was somehow being poisoned, possibly even pre-emptively executed, and was keeping it secret from me because he was rightly afraid I would kill as many of them as I could, and probably make my last stand from the highly explosive quantum foam if they didn’t let both of us leave in one piece and alive.</p><p>This did not make me more inclined to go out and party with Autobots. It only made me glumly question if Ratchet, who had become even more of a friend than he’d been in my youth, had been in on that plan. Which was not a thing I cared to believe, but I needed to remain undeceived.</p><p>Megatron groaned and sat down on his recharge slab. “Look,” he said, “if you and I both stay here—”</p><p>“They’ll just think we’re fragging,” I pointed out, without looking up at him. “What else would we be doing. Mirage told everyone you kissed my face off in his bar, and it’s not like the soundproofing here in this habsuite is equal to the kind of noise you sometimes get out of me. You need to give me a <i>reason</i> to go.” I leaned forward and stretched out as far as I could, both hands and feet on the floor, until I felt each vertebra loosen along the cables and release. It felt good. And I knew he liked watching me stretch.</p><p>“Tell me why I should be going to this social disaster. Even if you just want some alone time with Rodimus,” I teased. “You know I’m not the jealous type, and I swear I don’t want to join in.”</p><p>A pillow hit me squarely on the hip, accompanied by a choice Tarnian expletive.</p><p>“You want to set off a missile in here?” I pulled myself up to my feet in one fluid motion. He held his hand out, and I took it and told him: <i>I know you’re not planning to take Rodimus out and steal the ship, because you’d want me here if you were. And you know what? <b>We should.</b></i></p><p>Megatron actually rolled his optics at me. <i><b>Don’t</b> be ridiculous.</i></p><p>I gave him the daintiest shrug, rolling my shoulders and baring the spot on my neck where he’d left a fang mark. I was still wearing that diamond collar.</p><p>
  <i>If we brought this thing back, and left all the Autobots here, Soundwave would even forgive <b>you</b>. And if you insisted on dropping Roddy off somewhere nice, I’d be okay with that, but it would be fun to ransom him back to the Autobots.</i>
</p><p>I didn’t mention the possibility of epic three-way make-up interfacing, but I was prepared to say that out loud if I had to. I’d never got to have them both in a full-sized frame, so they’d always had to handle me like glass when I was between them.</p><p>Megatron rolled his optics at me again. “Stop being ridiculous,” he said out loud. “You’re smarter than this, little one.”</p><p>I grinned, because he <i>always</i> called me that when he was using his actual brain module to think. You know. Except not.</p><p>But he continued speaking into our joined hands: <i>If Soundwave wasn’t done with me when I abdicated, he was done with me three months after he sent you here, because you didn’t come home to him with my head, attached to my body or otherwise. And he knows perfectly well that as much as you love him, you’re not both recharging alone.</i></p><p>I shrugged. It was not a secret from Soundwave that there was a visceral lust between the two of us that in no way eclipsed the deep love and desire that bound me to him.</p><p>Megatron continued. <i>As stupidly beautiful as he is, I don’t fancy a knife in my back the first time he hears that Predacon yowl come out of your throat. The days when he would’ve asked me, or I would’ve offered, to show him what I just did so we’d both know the trick were over a few hundred years ago. I know he <b>says</b> he’s not jealous. I would make you a sizable bet that he won’t say that if you ask him again. Now that he knows you can choose to follow your own inclination, whether or not he expresses a preference.</i></p><p>That.</p><p>That <i>hurt</i>. I didn’t want to think that I’d been hurting the only person I had ever been and still was completely in love with, no matter how furious he made me.</p><p>That was also a thread I could shove into subconscious processing just in case Megatron was playing dirty in order to keep sucking Autobot spike, possibly even in the hope that Orion would notice he was still pretty good at it.</p><p><i>If your first and only objection to stealing this ship is that Soundwave doesn’t want your spike anymore, you’re starting to sound more like the mech I fell in lust with again, except for the part where <b>he</b> would have realised that was a dumb reason not to. We might as well do it, Captain Autobot.</i> I smirked at him.</p><p>“Brat,” he said aloud, and then into my hands: <i>Ultra Magnus is going to the party.</i></p><p><i>I didn’t really want him as a hostage anyway. That armour is made of nope.</i> I snorted. <i>The fox doesn’t go to parties unless someone orders him to. I take it you didn’t?</i></p><p>Megatron shook his head. <i>Neither did Rodimus. Aren’t you curious why he would go?</i></p><p><i>Then you should go,</i> I told him. I tapped my nose to make a salient point, which was that since I had found the other Minimus Ambus’ corpse by scent on the other Lost Light, I knew what he smelled like when he wasn’t wearing the armour. And I certainly knew what a horny fox who probably hadn’t been laid in millennia was when I smelled him. He might not have known it himself yet, but he <i>wanted</i> one of us. My money was on the one of us he kept finding excuses to talk to. <i>I think you could seduce the fox.</i></p><p><i>Stop <b>calling him that</b> before you do it in front of his face!</i> Megatron scowled at me, and I laughed, leaned over, and kissed the tip of his nose.</p><p>
  <i>I would never betray another <b>filthy animal</b> to the Autobots. Even if he’s one of them.</i>
</p><p><i>FINE,</i> Megatron said. I was pretty sure it was not fine. Especially when he stretched and rolled his shoulders at me, and continued talking without meeting my optics. <i>Rodimus blocked your comms on the Lost Light. Go over to the Vis Vitalis and you’ll be able to get your messages. Then we’ll know what’s going on with Soundwave and Galvatron, and I’m fairly sure that’s a matter of some concern to you. Copy the command keys out of the malware before you erase it and send it to me on our old private channel. I can unblock you permanently here from the conference room I’m meeting Rodimus in, and it’ll be fun to do it right under his nose.</i></p><p>I snorted. <i>Wouldn’t <b>stealing the ship</b> be more fun and profit?</i></p><p>Megatron ignored the question. <i>Do I have all your current passphrases? I’d like to make sure you’re able to get through.</i></p><p>Oh. Really. Really?</p><p>I crossed my arms over my chest. <i>Am I supposed to think you didn’t lead with the lure of getting my comms back because nothing the least bit hinky is happening tonight?</i> It was my turn to roll my optics at him. <i>Try again, lover. I’ll send the command keys. But if you want my passphrases, hack them yourself.</i></p><p><i>Come on, little one.</i> Megatron chuckled. <i>You think I want to read the notes you’ve been dying to send Soundwave, or you and Misfire heckling Starscream’s not-very-secret BC alts?</i></p><p>I smirked at him. Because, really, who wouldn’t want to read me and Misfire trolling the Pit out of Good King Starscream, The Chosen One? <i>Soundwave, Misfire and I are all still Decepticons. No Autobots allowed in my private comms!</i></p><p>I sat down on the recharge slab beside him. It was time to make anyone who might’ve been watching think the entire conversation we’d just had was actually foreplay. “You usually don’t call me that unless you want to have me.”</p><p>Megatron caught my wrists in one hand and used the leverage to lay me out. This course of action had an entirely predictable effect on me. “That’s because I usually do want to have you,” he said. “And I certainly won’t be able to have you tonight. Because you are <i>going</i> to the party.”</p><p>“You’d better make it worth my while,” I said, as his mouth ghosted down my thorax and over my central trunk, tracing rivulets and eddies of energy through my EM field with his free hand.</p><p>“Do I ever not?” He was licking my panel latch, tonguing around the edges, which probably tasted like the internal lubricant they weren’t really containing. “Give me your pretty spike. Now.”</p><p>Well. That was an order that was hard to refuse. I considered telling him to ask me politely, but then I realised I really didn’t want polite, especially with those heavy arms now holding my thighs apart with a pressure that stayed right on the glittery edge between pleasure and pain.</p><p>“Blow me,” I said, and released it into his waiting mouth.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0026"><h2>26. I'll make the bargain for us all</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>You're going to be fraggin' Prom Queen, Ravage.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Concurrent with and departing from the events of MTMTE #41-42</p><p>"...turn me back into the pet I was when we met<br/>I was happier then, with no mindset<br/>And if you'd took to me like a gull takes to the night<br/>I'd have jumped from my trees and danced like the king of the eyesores..."</p><p>Soundtrack: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYwCmcB0XMw">The Shins</a>, New Slang</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Before I left the habsuite to go over to the Vis Vitalis, my attention deflector mesh had been unceremoniously confiscated. I thought this was very unfair.</p><p>Megatron had painted my face and draped strings of red corundum beads over my shoulders and around my body, in addition to the diamond collar he’d already given me. Then he had had told me to go and <i>dance</i> with people…in addition to getting my communications access restored.</p><p>I had been taught to dance early in life, but I’d been trained as a performer. And I’d grown to hate performing very shortly after they sold me. The dances I knew were beastformer dances, suited to people who spent most of their time with all four of their paws on the ground. I’d come to enjoy them again at Decepticon parties, among people who respected me, but I didn’t want to do those dances for Autobots. And I was also still recovering from surgery that had changed my centre of gravity and proprioception.</p><p>No matter what Megatron, who was not even remotely biased at all, and was definitely thinking with his brain module and not his interface array, said, I wasn’t the dancer I’d been when I’d boarded the ship. I also didn’t think that it was an accident that he had made me look like I had in an old Decepticon propaganda poster—one that I’d designed, which had purposefully challenged Functionalist standards of desirability.</p><p>I also wondered who and what I was meant to be distracting everyone from.</p><p>Swerve and Riptide both looked gobsmacked when I walked up to the bar and demanded pre-pre-wake fortification. Riptide was clearly appreciating the view, but Swerve…just looked concerned. Riptide set my bowl on the bar, but Swerve stopped him, took down a glass, and filled that up instead. “You okay, Rav? When I heard the old man wasn’t going, I thought you’d stay back too.”</p><p>“I’ve been more okay than I am right now,” I allowed. Drinking from a glass with a stem just made me feel even weirder and more posh than I already did, but I kind of enjoyed it. “Does it show?”</p><p>“No,” said Riptide abruptly. “Not to anyone who doesn’t know you. Go and rock everyone’s world. Even Nautica will think twice about patting you on the head when you walk in there looking like that.”</p><p>Swerve glared at him. “He doesn’t have to.” Then he looked back at me. “You want to go and hide in the vents all night, see what your old man gets up to? I’ll never tell. You’re still a Con. You don’t have to do what Megatron says anymore.”</p><p>I grinned. “That’s what I told him. But I’ll be all right. He’s just decided to push me <i>out of my comfort zone</i>.”</p><p>“Okay. But you don’t gotta let him, beautiful.” Swerve grinned back at me. Then they went back to their argument about some television show the Earthlings had made. I didn’t really listen, but I wasn’t inclined to get up and leave, either. As a result, I ended up going over to the Vis Vitalis with both of them.</p><p>Once we got there, Swerve was kind enough to offer me his arm before we walked out onto the floor. “If you’re going to do this, you do it,” he said. “No sitting over on the sidelines with Rung and Cyclonus and the rest of the wallflowers. If he wants to make you show yourself off for some kind of distraction, okay, but you’re not gonna be a pathetic one. You’re going to be fraggin’ prom queen, Ravage. Sixteen candles and all.”</p><p>I glanced down at him, smiling helplessly. “Swerve, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Prom queens and candles? Just ask me to dance if you want to.”</p><p>“What…me?” Swerve blinked at me. “Ravage, you’re…”</p><p>“Actually not being courted by Megatron,” I said after a moment. “Just…making a lot of noise with him sometimes. For fun. And even if I were, he isn’t <i>here</i>. I am allowed to dance with friends.”</p><p>“Well, yeah, but why me?” Swerve’s entire face reddened.</p><p>“You don’t have to,” I said. “But it wouldn’t hurt me to dance the first round with someone who actually gives a slag how I feel about this.” To his credit, he didn’t need to be asked again.</p><p>To my credit, my feet actually remembered what I was trying to do, even though I was used to partnered dancing as a much shorter person, with a partner much taller. I’d learned with my paws on Soundwave’s chest and his arms round my shoulders, because I wasn’t properly bipedal then without a lot of support.</p><p>I knew he wanted to mingle, so I thanked him for the dance when the music stopped. He just looked up at me, bewildered, like I was the one who had done him a favour.</p><p>A member of the host crew was already waiting to ask me to dance. I had no idea who he was. He was awfully pretty—no Soundwave, but pretty—and terribly young. He looked at me like he wanted to kiss me. I wouldn’t have let him, but the dancing was nice.</p><p>I danced with a few other mechs after that, but the young one kept coming back. He told me to call him Agathon. I thanked him for the energon fizz he brought me, but I had to make my excuses to go and open my comm and send Megatron the code I found in the malware.</p><p>And then I saw all of Soundwave’s messages, left on our private backchannels. They were all more or less the same, some shorter, some longer.</p><p>
  <i>Orders rescinded. I love you. I miss you. I need you. Come home.</i>
</p><p>A few of them were more explicit than that about some of the ways in which I was needed or missed, but not very many, because he hadn’t ever been good with words on that subject. That just made them more raw and more heart-breaking.</p><p>I wanted to message him back, but I needed at least an hour free to find the right words. What I really wanted was a spacebridge straight to Io. I did not want to be at a party dancing with strangers. I was one slow song with sad lyrics away from bursting into tears like a newspark. I missed him so much that it was a physical ache. I was still <i>furious</i> that he’d ordered me to kill my dearest friend, and there were things we needed to talk about, but <i>he was my <b>home</b>.</i></p><p>I fumbled a lanthanum chip out of my subspace, because I was not going to be seen or heard crying, not here, not by these people, and I wasn’t sure I could stop myself. Big mistake.</p><p>
  <i>It felt like there were eyes all over me. Hungry eyes with mouths in them, nipping at the metal of my plating, trying to crawl into my vents—licking at the latches and seams of my panels…</i>
</p><p>The next thing I knew, Agathon was picking me up off the floor and some Camien femme I didn’t know was asking me how many drinks I’d had. “Honestly? One, unless there’s high-grade in those fizzes. I just had cassette manumission surgery and I’ve been exclusively on medical-grade for most of the past tenday. I had one glass of engex before I came here, and that was from Swerve’s, so I know it’s okay. I can’t drink high-grade and dance. I’ve just had to learn to move all over again…”</p><p>Agathon stared at me. “Cassette manumission…?” Then I saw him, seeing for the first time, the badges I wore on my shoulders. The ones that weren’t red. His entire expression changed. “<i>Who <b>are</b> you?</i>”</p><p>“I’m Ravage of Go Frag Yourself, and I just want to go home!” I snapped, suddenly remembering the hallucination I’d experienced before my fall. “What the Pit did they put in the lavender energon fizzes? For a minute there I was hallucinating squishy nasty organic <i>eyeballs</i> all over me.”</p><p>The Camien femme did not look happy at all. “I think you should come to the medbay—”</p><p>“I’m fine. I want to go back to the Lost Light. Lord Megatron will take care of me—”</p><p>“I’m sorry!” Agathon shouted, cutting me off. “I was just shocked! I didn’t know that there were any former Decepticons on the guest list—”</p><p>“You mean like <i><b>Megatron</b></i>?”</p><p>“I believe in the Reintegration Act!” he protested.</p><p>“Good for you!” I shot back. “<i>I don’t!</i> I’m <i>still</i> a Decepticon, and I’ll die one. Frag the Reintegration Act right up the aft! People like me can’t be reintegrated—we were never <i>integrated</i> to start with!”</p><p>“Ravage…?”</p><p>“Just go away,” I said. “We were never going to go out. You’re not even a tenth of my age, and I already have too many boyfriends.”</p><p>I straightened the red corundum beads, which I fortunately hadn’t purged on, and draped them artfully across my body, then got up and walked back out onto the dance floor.</p><p>Another Camien femme—a big one, whose helm was on fragging fire—reached for my arm, and I let her take it; she wasn’t trying to pet or console me, she was dragging me out into the centre of the dance floor. I danced with her…<i>like a cat</i>. I moved the way I would’ve done if she’d been Soundwave. I stayed on two legs, but I put my paws on her shoulders, I jumped and stretched and moved with the music entirely in accord with my own inclinations.</p><p>I still felt like everything in the universe was watching me—like even the stars had optics—and it still made me feel dizzy and vaguely ill. But I didn’t want to stop dancing. I felt like I could have done it forever. And then she dipped me. And then there were explosions.</p><p>I felt like I was going to purge fuel again. Instead, I passed out.</p><p>I woke up in Megatron’s arms; he was carrying me back to the habsuite. My head felt like Rumble and Frenzy were in there, with the pile drivers going full blast. “What happened? Did they poison me? Did whatever you wanted me to distract people from go all right? What in the Pit were you blowing up before I passed out?”</p><p>“That isn’t why I sent you to the party,” he said gently, laying me out on the recharge slab. “I sent you to the party because if you really want this movement to continue, you’re going to have to get used to being out in the open, and not in the shadows. This may not have been the ideal time for you to rediscover your natural charisma, but…at least I’m absolutely certain I was right in believing you had it.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0027"><h2>27. an endless road to rediscover</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Misfire had no idea that collecting cybercats was going to become a part of his job when he started playing that game.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Following the alternate-universe version of the events of MTMTE #41-42</p><p>"What if I'm far from home?<br/>Oh brother, I will hear you call<br/>What if I lose it all?<br/>Oh sister, I will help you out<br/>Oh, if the sky comes falling down<br/>For you, there's nothing in this world I wouldn't do."</p><p>Soundtrack:  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Cp6mKbRTQY">Avicii</a>, "Hey Brother"</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Misfire had spent much of the morning engrossed in redecorating his Cybercat Tower when Solarpuss Prime finally decided to put in an appearance. Just as he was about to collect the elusive cat, however, Grimlock decided to start thrashing around like something was trying to eat him from the inside out. This would probably have interfered with Misfire’s game even if he hadn’t been leaning against Grimlock, which he totally was.</p><p>Misfire removed his headphones and patted the big bot’s side. “Hey big guy, what’s wrong?”</p><p>Grimlock had his hands over his ears. “MAKE IT STOP!” he howled.</p><p>That was when Misfire noticed that his laptop, which Fulcrum had of course left on with the battery running, was making an awful racket. It had been…well, not a long time, but at least a few days…since Misfire had heard the noise that over 100+ Big Conversation notifications and counting could make.</p><p>Misfire switched off the speaker and frowned. “Sorry about that.” He patted Grimlock again.  Grimlock was actually producing words. He would really have liked just to be able to be happy about that. But those were <i>priority</i> notifications. Either the site administration was desperately trying to get his attention (and it had been at least three days since he’d done anything truly obnoxious), or someone he tracked had been posting. A lot.</p><p>Turned out, it was both.</p><p>Emerald Wings was one of the few BC admins who actually seemed to like Misfire, enough that he occasionally wondered if he knew her, or at least knew someone she knew. (He figured she was probably some sort of jet, with a name like that, so maybe he’d trained with her before she knew she was a her. Although she could just as easily have been a sanitation mini-bot with an active fantasy life.) She was very concerned. She wanted to know if Misfire knew what the frag his occasional partner-in-internet-crime, @cybercatastrophe, thought he was up to, or if he’d been hacked, and if so, what did he think she should do? The words ‘DJD’ and ‘The List’ featured prominently in her messages. (As if the DJD did not have better things to do than watch people be Wrong On The Internet.)</p><p><i><b>@cybercatastrophe</b></i> had been posting?</p><p>Oh, yeah. He’d been tracking that User ID, both as a friend and on Soundwave’s behalf. There were at least 150 pings.</p><p>The Boss had officially listed Ravage as an Autobot captive, and was demanding that Ravage be returned to him in one piece and in good condition as soon as possible. Of course Galvatron, who was a giant gashole as always, kept taking Ravage’s name off the POW list. There were other less charitable stories floating around, which Galvatron apparently believed, because he was exactly the sort of glitchspark who would. The Boss had actually shot someone for repeating that slag in his presence; surprisingly, rumour had it the dumbaft survived.</p><p>How was Ravage posting from Autobot jail?</p><p>This looked like a queue being emptied, except queues were supposed to post things one at a time. There were at least a hundred posts and more were going up. Mostly poetry. Ravage never showed <i>anyone</i> his poetry.</p><p>Also, there were a good half-dozen posts in a serious political/philosophical forum that was maintained by some of the biggest wankers on the site, and while a lot of people had Liked them…some of the people who’d read them were <i>really hacked off</i>.</p><p>Emerald Wings had frozen the entire discussion after DaRealDJD (who couldn’t possibly be, of course) had posted a section of what was allegedly the List with Ravage’s name highlighted. He was now under a vorn-long ban for attempted doxxing, which was hilarious, because everyone knew who @cybercatastrophe was, but everyone also knew that Emerald Wings had hated DaRealDJD since forever and here he’d just gone and handed her a TOS violation from somewhere out of Unicron’s armpit. That kind of stupidity was basically a singularity and whoever DaRealDJD was, everyone around him was going to be making good decisions for <i>months</i> just to keep the universe balanced.</p><p>Scrap.</p><p>Misfire was one of the few people who even knew that Ravage actually wrote poetry down, instead of just producing quips at the drop of a pin during games and arguments. He knew this because he’d actually seen some of it completely by accident. And the post he was looking at was definitely something he had read before.</p><p>What. The. Frag.</p><p>Also, poor Megatron, which were not two words that normally anyone thought at the same time, but…that was <i>incredibly bitchy</i> of Ravage, to a degree that he hadn’t appreciated at the time when he’d first seen it, probably because he was too busy apologising for grabbing the wrong datapad.</p><p>He fired off a reply to Emerald Wings, asking her to check the IP, although he knew it was almost certainly fake, even if he wasn’t about to suggest that to <i>her</i>.</p><p>He also sent Soundwave a query on a channel he used only very infrequently nowadays; if something had <i>happened</i> to Ravage, he didn’t expect a very coherent response, but posting the entirety of Ravage’s written works to the BC was the sort of thing he might have expected Soundwave to do if Ravage had, say, died in captivity, and Galvatron was dragging his reputation through the recycler.</p><p>Then he fired off a personal communication on an equally private backchannel to Ravage himself.</p><p>
  <i>CAT. I don’t know where you are or if you’ll even get this. But what in the Pit have you done?</i>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0028"><h2>28. when you look you will not find me</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>He's been in my life for four million years. I know what kind of person he is.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>“The tide is calling out for changes<br/>Oh, what an ocean of time that we wasted<br/>I was waiting for the let go<br/>I swore I wouldn't 'til you said so<br/>I put the pieces back together<br/>So thank you or whatever<br/>Nothing lasts forever, man, I guess so"</p><p>Soundtrack: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcnUJTIyjXs">Elle King</a>, The Let Go</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Personality ticks,” I repeated, flatly. I’ve lived most of my life with Rumble, Frenzy, and Laserbeak, and I still was not actually sure this wasn’t the stupidest thing I’d ever heard. It was definitely among the top ten. And the worst part of it all was that apparently it was an actual science fact that these things existed.</p><p>Invisible charisma parasites? Farfetched.</p><p>Invisible charisma parasites that could be destroyed or dispelled by overfeeding? Insane.</p><p>Me, being the target of invisible charisma parasites? Un-fragging-believable.</p><p>“Personality ticks,” First Aid repeated. “Fortunately, you survived. And so did Skids, Getaway, and even Thunderclash.”</p><p>“Okay,” I said, “but if they were charisma parasites, you’re going to have to explain what they wanted with Getaway, because he’s a <i>gashole</i>.”</p><p>First Aid just gave me this look, like there was something he really wanted to say, but professional boundaries were making that impossible. Whatever it was, I was very okay with him not being able to say it. Then he looked over my head. He was looking at Megatron.</p><p>“Aren’t you supposed to be on the bridge?” I made a face at him. “Lately, it seems like everything I do at your request ends up with me face-planting. If you’d come over earlier, this would never have <i>happened</i> to me.”</p><p>“I’ll just leave you two alone,” said First Aid, hands clasped behind his back. “You are perfectly healthy and also, apparently, rather charismatic when you’re out in the open.” He gave a tiny almost-bow and left. I felt like maybe I should apologise, but I had no idea for what.</p><p>“If I’d come over without Rodimus,” Megatron said, “it would probably have been worse, not better. Shall we leave?”</p><p>“I can get back to the habsuite by myself. You heard him say there’s absolutely nothing wrong with me. I had over one hundred messages from Soundwave, and I need to reply, and I don’t want you hovering around when I do it. I need some <i>space</i>, Megatron.”</p><p>His optics dimmed, but then, he nodded, and glanced down at his pedes. He started to go, but then turned on his heel. “Little one.”</p><p>I looked up at him sceptically. “Don’t even try to manipulate me.”</p><p>He shook his head. His optics were still dim, and he had a faint, fond smile. “I’m done with that, I think. Finally.”</p><p>I pulled air in through all my intakes to cool myself. “Megatron, what have you done?”</p><p>“What I needed to, as always,” he said with a shrug. “But I’m sorry that it hurt you, and that it will likely continue to hurt you. Ravage. I meant what I said when I told you that I absolutely cannot do this anymore. I’m done with the Decepticons. But it’s very clear to me that you’re not.” He swooped in over me and kissed my forehead before I could even move to get out of his way, then grabbed my hands and held them over his spark chamber.</p><p>
  <i>It’s <b>your</b> revolution now. Make me proud.</i>
</p><p>“I don’t understand,” I said out loud.</p><p>“I know. But you will. I wanted to be there to help you think things through when you figured it out. But now I’m not sure that’s a good idea. You can think for yourself. You’ve always been able to think for yourself. I’m going to the bridge.” He dropped my hands and walked away.</p><p>The Camien femme who’d come out to see to me at the party, Velocity, peeked into the room after he left. “Are you still here? Is something wrong?” She glanced in Megatron’s direction, frowning. “Did you just get dumped?” She swooped in and then checked herself, looking at me like she wanted to put her arm round my shoulders but just figured out that wounded wild animals bite. “Platonic severance is <i>really hard</i>. Don’t be ashamed of yourself if you need help getting through it…”</p><p>I couldn’t help it; I started laughing out loud. “I didn’t get dumped,” I told her. “But keep an eye on him. I think he thinks I’m going to dump <i>him</i>.”</p><p>Velocity made a face. “I’ve seen that look before. He’s done something you haven’t found out about yet.”</p><p>I burst out laughing again. “He’s probably done <i>several hundred things</i> I haven’t found out about yet. He’s been in my life for four million years. I know what kind of person he is.”</p><p>As I walked back to the habsuite, I noticed that people were looking at me in a different way than they usually did. I didn’t have the deflector mesh on, but they weren’t looking at me the way they had when I showed myself before.</p><p>A lot of the looks I got said ‘Slag, when did Ravage get hot?’ That just made me laugh inside. I’ve always been hot. It wasn’t my fault they hadn’t noticed before.</p><p>But then Mirage stopped in the hall and looked down at me. I stopped and looked up at him, crossing my arms across my chest. “Do you want to apologise?”</p><p>He was unruffled. But then he said, “Yes. Yes, I do.”</p><p>“Do you even know what you’re apologising for?” I demanded, with some irritation. I needed to get a message to Soundwave. If temporal anomalies actually worked out in my favour for once, perhaps I could even hear his voice live. Even tinny with ten-minute lag, I wouldn’t have cared.</p><p>“Underestimating you,” said Mirage. “Because I should have realised that Starscream is probably the <i>least</i> intelligent of all the people he was carrying on with.” He shrugged. “For what it’s worth, I think people would actually come if <i>you</i> gave a reading.”</p><p>I frowned. “Comparing me to Starscream is damnation with faint praise if ever I heard it, and I understand you care about your bottom line, but…why would I give a <i>reading</i> in Visages?”</p><p>Mirage shrugged philosophically. “I know Swerve’s been nicer to you, and I probably deserve that, but that’s really not the best sort of venue for something like this—”</p><p>“Something like <i>what</i>?” I was really only thinking of Soundwave. “Look, I’ll accept your apology for treating me like a cheap piece of trash that Megatron found in a gutter, as long as you can actually admit that that’s what you did. But I would rather do that later, because I have some very important messages to respond to!”</p><p>Mirage’s entire demeanour changed, as if he knew exactly what I meant and how important it was to me, which was ridiculous of course. “I <i>do</i> admit that’s what I did. I <i>am</i> very sorry. And I <i>completely</i> understand. I’ll talk to you later. I hope.”</p><p>“Good,” I said. Once I got to the habsuite, I threw myself on the recharge slab and stared at the ceiling, which wasn’t what I’d wanted to do at all. But I was exhausted, just from walking through the corridors while bots I’d never noticed before hit on me with their optics—and talking to Mirage, of all people.</p><p>Soundwave had sent a new message. I opened that first, after checking to make sure that he wasn’t online, because usually he was at least on idle, but apparently he was recharging. The message hit hard: </p><p>
  <i>I love you. All is forgiven. Orders rescinded. Please, just come home. So I can protect you.</i>
</p><p>I read it five times before I could answer, hoping he’d come online, and finally broke down and had the ugly, hard cry I’d been wanting to have since I first saw his messages. Then, I replied: </p><p>
  <i>I love you too. Rodimus cut me off from you because he thought I was your spy, which we both know I totally am, so I can’t really blame him. I’m coming home as soon as I figure out how to get there from here. Ping me if you see me online. I never stopped loving you, but there were things I needed to do. Also, I desperately need you to frag me right through the berth.</i>
</p><p>Then there was a message from Esmeral of Ankokuyousai. 

<i>Dezza would like to talk to you. He’s interested in some of your ideas. Also, I froze your BC account. Misfire says you wrote at least some of what you’ve posted, but you started a sitewide flame war and then we got hit with a DDOS attack. I’ll unfreeze you as soon as you confirm that this was you. Or that it wasn’t, in which case we both have a lot of work to do.</i></p><p>In that moment, I knew that the Knights of Cybertron probably didn’t exist. And they would not decide to murder Megatron. But for ten shanix, a packet of Copper Curlz, and most important of all, a spacebridge to Io…it would at least be revenge, and decently personal.</p><p>
  <i>I’m always happy to talk to you and Dezza, even if it’s been two million years since the last time I saw him. I’ve always wanted to meet you face to face. I haven’t seen what I allegedly posted yet, but if Misfire says I wrote it, I probably did. But I’m pretty sure Megatron posted it all, and I’m going to need a password reset. If you need help finding his alts, let me know.</i>
</p><p>Then there was Misfire’s message. If I hadn’t already been crying from reading Soundwave’s, that one would’ve done it, too. I replied to that one as well. </p><p>
  <i>I’m fine. Can you and Krok come get me? Soundwave will pay, you know that. I’ll tell you where we’re landing next as soon as I know. I want out of here. I want to go home. I am so done with everyone here, Megatron included, except for Swerve and this medic from Caminus, who hasn’t hacked me off yet because she’s been here maybe a day.</i>
</p><p>I paused after that to dash off a message to Megatron. </p><p>
  <i>Hope you enjoyed my spike yesterday afternoon because that was the last time you’ll ever see my arrays. I will be moving out of this room even if I have to sleep in the vents. I'd rather live with Nautica than you.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>I will always love you and I’m not going to ask for severance, but I also hate your internals right now and if you try to put a hand on me I’ll bite it off.</i>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0029"><h2>29. waystations</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>As posted to <a href="https://tfwiki.net/wiki/The_Big_Conversation">The Big Conversation</a><br/>by @EmeraldWings [administrator]</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>Disclaimer: The following post is a reflection of my personal opinions as a citizen of Ankokuyousai, not an administrator of this website. It is not a position paper on behalf of <i>The Big Conversation</i>’s owners, administrative staff, or creator.</b>
</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>_____________________________</p>
</div><p>Let’s talk about Ankokuyousai.</p><p>We’ve done some real things out here. We don’t need Autobot lies to live in peace together. We take what we need like anyone else, but we don’t let anyone starve and no one’s enslaved. You can leave if you want. We left Megatron.</p><p>Let’s step away from the question of dreams and lies, @cybercatastrophe. How do our many realities differ, and can any of them be improved? Can we take the best from each of them?</p><p>I’m happier when I’m kind, but some people like being cruel. The Autobots think most of us do. It lets them pretend they don’t have plenty like that themselves. People who like being cruel are still teachable. They can learn that a world where misery festers is always going to blow up in their faces.</p><p>Our people aren’t charitable and most of us aren’t gentler than you. We survive in a self-contained world where there’s not much to spare. Sometimes the equations are cold and we all have to suffer together. We spread the privations around when we have to because it’s safer for everyone. Maybe it’s better to live knowing that resources are limited everywhere, even on planets where everything’s still alive. The point is to keep things alive because nothing else matters after that.</p><p>We’re not Megatron’s shining empire of knives and claws; it’s a bad idea to leave sharps lying around when you can’t let the air out. We didn’t pick a beautiful lie to make true, so we’re not the dream @cybercatastrophe wants to make real. We have problems like everyone else. </p><p>But I think we’re a waystation.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0030"><h2>30. you won't know if you'll make it till you have</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>We all come unwillingly into the light.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>An argument on <a href="https://tfwiki.net/wiki/The_Big_Conversation">The Big Conversation</a><br/>From the comments on a <a href="#section0018">post</a> by banned user @unit-d-16</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>@cybercatastrophe:</b>
</p><p>I suppose we all come unwillingly into the light<br/>
Our sparks unprepared for the chill of this unthinking, careless universe,<br/>
Uncertain, without any promises made for our futures.</p><p>And I know there are people who were made to go into the darkness<br/>
And bring back the bright things that hide there<br/>
And give us all life.</p><p>Just remember that once you release things, they're no longer yours to control.</p><p>
  <b>@unit-d-16:</b>
</p><p>A tyrant grown weary of his own rusting arrogance<br/>
Might think that a diamond, once treasured in secret<br/>
Belongs to the people in need of its brilliance.</p><p>And dangle it into a sky full of smoke<br/>
Where the promised city of blades is in hiding.</p><p>
  <b>@cybercatastrophe:</b>
</p><p>If you don't like the rules, change the game, someone said,<br/>
and as strategy goes, there is no surer way to prevail.</p><p>I'm tired of your rusty old metaphors.</p><p>People will say you're no fun any more.<br/>
Dare me. You always do anyway.</p><p>
  <b>@unit-d-16:</b>
</p><p>People say lots of things, most of them foolish<br/>
And there isn't a single game worth my time that isn't worth winning.</p><p>Your arguments are too sharp for whispers in darkness.<br/>
Call me out on the floor, and don't pull your blows.</p><p>I only wish you'd done it all along.</p><p>And as for this game:<br/>
I dare you to <i>finish the job</i>.</p><p>
  <b>@cybercatastrophe:</b>
</p><p>The revolution, or destroying it?<br/>
You've been so busy lately, I'm not sure.</p><p>
  <b>@unit-d-16:</b>
</p><p>I've done what I thought best, and you will, too.<br/>
And you're bound to do one or the other--but I'd bet that you'll win.</p><p>Would I have spent all of my years confiding in you<br/>
If I thought you could ever do less?</p><p>Now get on with it, go make me proud<br/>
I'd like to believe I've done one thing right by your spark.</p><p>He'd let you stay in the shadows, for love of you;<br/>
It's a love you deserve and I'll celebrate<br/>
But for love of us all, you're ejected for good.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0031"><h2>31. for taking in an unsheathed knife</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>“Primus’ sainted aftbreach, has everyone here read my poetry?”</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>"You are not some saint who's above<br/>Giving someone a stroll through the flowers<br/>You've got so much more to dream of..."</p><p>Soundtrack: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rx90unirOEA">The Shins</a>, "Girl Sailor"</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The bar wasn’t even open yet, but Swerve let me in anyway. He glanced pointedly at the bag I had slung over my shoulder, but he didn’t mention it. I wondered how much he’d heard. He set a glass of high-grade and a plate stacked with sweets on the bar in front of me.</p><p>“I might be too broke for all that,” I said, a little regretfully. “I don’t expect Megatron to be paying for everything anymore.”</p><p>Swerve shrugged. “The captain will pay for it,” he informed me. “Whether or not you’re sharing his berth. If he knows what’s good for him.”</p><p>I ex-vented, but I took a sip of the high-grade. “Does everyone on the whole ship know exactly what happened already? I didn’t think that many people on an Autobot ship would be reading <i>The Big Conversation</i>.”</p><p>“I don’t think they know exactly what happened.” Swerve shrugged. “A lot of them aren’t real observant. Someone reposted a few of the racier ones to Autobuddies, and they argued about who they all thought @cybercatastrophe was. Then the Prime had it all taken down.”</p><p>“Of course he did,” I said, and collapsed into helpless laughter. “Orion, you <i>fragstaff</i>…”</p><p>Swerve looked up at me, shrugged, and tore open a flimsy packet, spilling a glittery powder into my high-grade. “That’s for your processor cramps.” I nodded and drank it all down. He refilled the glass. “I think you should stay,” he said after a moment. “We’ve all just started getting to know you.”</p><p>“There’s a few people here I wish I had time to know better,” I admitted, after a moment. “And yes, you’re one of them. But I have to go. There’s someone out there who needs me a lot more than anyone here on this ship does.” I’d taken a nap on the observation deck earlier, only to be awakened by a ping from Soundwave. The message had been recorded, but he’d made it at the burning heart of a mess that Galvatron had made; I could hear explosions and gunfire. In the middle of that, he’d taken a moment to tell me that yes, we would be together again, and soon—no matter how many markers he had to call in.</p><p>I should probably have been worried about him, but I was incapable of believing he wouldn’t survive, now that he knew I was coming back home.</p><p>“What do you need, though, Ravage?” Swerve’s voice was very gentle, which was probably why it got through my remembrance. “You did make a pretty good prom queen, you know.”</p><p>“I still don’t know what that means.” I scratched an itchy spot behind one ear. I wasn’t sure how to explain it. “The Decepticons were once opposed to formalised relationships on principle,” I finally said, “because you’re not supposed to own other people. But even after Megatron decided he might as well let people get junxed if they wanted to, I never got that. Cassettes can’t say no to their carriers, which meant he couldn’t ask me. Now, though, I can ask him. And he can say yes.”</p><p>I was tempted to run off at the mouth some more, so I stuck a lavender-pink gel flecked with copper into my mouth and kept it there till it melted.</p><p>“Good luck,” said Swerve. “Don’t let Soundwave start the war again, okay?”</p><p>“He doesn’t want the war,” I said. “He’s not…he’s not like that. He’s really a very kind person, honestly. Think about it. Who else in the Conclave ever had so many dependents? And all the real misfits would always end up under his command. If he’d been our leader, everything would’ve been different…”</p><p>Swerve took the bar towel and dabbed at my face. “Don’t cry,” he said softly. “I believe you.”</p><p>I winced. Were my optics leaking <i>again</i>? “It’s just nerves,” I lied.</p><p>“Well, drink up then, and soon you’ll be right as rain.” Swerve went and opened the doors. I wondered where the hell he got those crazy sayings, but I didn’t ask. There were a lot of other things on my mind. Maybe someday I would get to know him better, once the little wars were over enough that I could be sure we were truly done with the big ones. But it wasn’t going to be today.</p><p>I opened my messages up again, and was relieved to see that Esmeral had already deleted the poems I’d asked her to scrub from the system; some of them had been things I had always meant to show Soundwave, and nobody else—especially not Megatron, not to mention Orion Pax. I really hoped that none of those had ended up on Autobuddies.</p><p>As soon as I’d finished the entire plate of sweets, Ultra Magnus requested my presence—almost as if he’d known.</p><p>I swallowed the rest of my drink and headed down to his office. Our previous conversations hadn’t been easy ones. I’d sniffed his dead body out on the other ship and I very badly wanted to tell him to stop pretending he wasn’t a fragging turbofox. He’d spent a lot of time telling me how many rules I had broken, as if he thought I might not know that sneaking on board an Autobot spaceship to spy on Megatron was illegal.</p><p>I hoped he hadn’t seen my parody of the Autobot Code. Swerve hadn’t mentioned it ending up on Autobuddies, but I’d have been very surprised if it hadn’t. Then again, Orion had likely deleted that too, and Ultra Magnus didn’t strike me as the type to spend time on websites that were meant for fun and friendship.</p><p>“Ravage,” he said, looking down at me from the full height of that blasted armour. “Are you all right?” Frag if he didn’t look just as nervous as I was.</p><p>“I’m fine,” I said, and sat down, crossing my ankles and curling my tail around myself. “Thank you for asking.”</p><p>He glanced at a datapad, then set it aside. “Why were you recharging on the observation deck this afternoon? That’s against regulations, you know.”</p><p>Of course it was. It had probably been against the rules on the Nemesis, too, but nobody had ever dared to tell me so. “Just tired,” I said, and hoped it looked convincing.</p><p>“Ah. Is there a reason the co-captain suggested to me that you might be requesting another habsuite assignment?” He gave me a <i>very serious</i> look that I’m sure he also intended to be <i>very kind</i> instead of just <i>very embarrassed and also completely hilarious</i>.</p><p>I glanced down at my claws, which suddenly seemed to be extremely interesting, and was very glad there were no flecks of silver paint under them anywhere. “People are talking about us. I thought it might be better for his reputation, and the ship’s morale—”</p><p>Ultra Magnus cut me off, and for a horrible moment I thought he was going to tell me he knew I was lying my aft off, then ask what we had been fighting about. But that didn’t happen. “You’re right, of course,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”</p><p>“Thank you,” I said. “I won’t recharge on the observation deck again.”</p><p>Ultra Magnus looked pained. “As long as that doesn’t mean you’re going to nap in the vents.”</p><p>“Of course not,” I said, but I made him no promises.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>~*~*~*~</p>
</div>Riptide was behind the bar when I got back. The place had filled up but my seat was still empty. Someone had put a ‘reserved’ sign there. I tucked it into my subspace to take home as a keepsake. “So,” he said.  “Megatron or Soundwave?”<p>The bar was noisy as ever but it felt like we were in a bubble of silence.</p><p>“If,” he said. “If you had to choose.”</p><p>I glared up at Riptide. “Is this a <i>suicide attempt</i>?”</p><p>He leaned over and looked me in the eye. “Because I’m thinking Megatron.”</p><p>“I never said that.” I looked him right back in the eye with an expression that I hoped made it clear that I was willing to punctuate the sentence with at least five claws, maybe ten.</p><p>Riptide glanced over at Swerve, who’d been talking to someone else. “Remember when Megatron said Soundwave had to be doing all right, or Ravage would’ve gone home, and <i>he</i> said—”</p><p>Swerve looked up at him and said, in a deadly serious tone, “Shut up.”</p><p>I smiled sweetly at both of them. “Thanks, Swerve.” To Riptide I then said, “It’s ‘she’, today.”</p><p>Riptide rolled his optics. “Look, I’m just a dumb MTO, okay, not the next poet laureate of Cybertron. Megatron might think it’s cute, but I’m having a hard enough time getting used to the idea of all these pronouns without you playing games, so if neither of the ones in common use appeals to you, why don’t you make up one of your own? Because that would be easier.”</p><p>“Leave her alone!” One of the voices was Swerve, which I had expected. The other one was Nautica’s. Which I hadn’t.</p><p><i>The next poet laureate of Cybertron.</i> “Primus’ sainted aftbreach, has everyone here read my poetry?” I snapped.</p><p>I’d thought that Riptide and Nautica were friends. She was looking at me as if she wanted to say something, badly. I cocked my head at her in confusion.</p><p>“Some people go back and forth for a while. It’s all right.”</p><p>I shook my head. “I don’t think it’s going to settle for me. Anyhow, I don’t really care that much about pronouns. My name doesn’t change, the way I look doesn’t change, just sometimes the way I think of myself in my head changes. If I can’t explain it, I can’t expect anyone else to understand it. Except Soundwave, who always has. But he can read minds. Riptide just hacked me off.”</p><p>Nautica shrugged. “You have the right to be called whatever you want.”</p><p>I cracked up. “As long as you don’t call me ‘poppet’ again.” I took my drink and walked over to her. “We can talk. As long as you don’t lay hands on me.”</p><p>Nautica winced. “I won’t,” she said, and we went over to one of the booths.</p><p>“What is it,” I said as I slid in. I’d never noticed how big she was before.</p><p>“You did me a solid with Firestar at the dance,” she began. “She’s my amica, but things are difficult sometimes.”</p><p>I laughed out loud. “What would I know about having a difficult amica?” I didn’t tell her I hadn’t even known the name of the Camien femme I’d let drag me out on the dance floor. It didn’t seem to be the right time.</p><p>Nautica nodded. “There’s that.” She laced her fingers around her drink. “But Brainstorm was reading some stuff you wrote—”</p><p>I groaned. “Of course he is,” I snarked. “Neither he nor Megatron are Decepticons anymore, but one of them uploaded things that I never intended anyone else to read to a Decepticon social networking site, and the other one’s reading it there.”</p><p>“No, but he read it to me—” Then her jaw dropped. “Megatron uploaded that? Not you?”</p><p>I nodded. She reached for my hand and then stopped herself. “I’m sorry.”</p><p>“You didn’t do it.” I finished the rest of my drink in one gulp.</p><p>“No, but one of them was about me—  Let me get you another one,” she said, and was up to get it before I could refuse the offer.</p><p>I wasn’t sure I needed another drink, but I took it anyway. “Thanks.”</p><p>Nautica looked thoroughly embarrassed. “I’m sorry. The things you wrote.”</p><p>I shrugged. “You know I’m not the only filthy animal who’s smart enough to string words together, don’t you? You might be surprised if you knew who else was as beastly as me.” I wouldn’t tell her about Ultra Magnus, but if she’d asked, I probably wouldn’t have lied.</p><p>“I want to be better than the femme in that poem.”</p><p>I smiled at her. “It’s a start.” I held out my hand, and she took it, and we both laughed together.</p><p>“So, are you going to break up with him? I wouldn’t normally say this, as a Camien, but he kind of deserves it.” Nautica frowned. “It was awful of him to violate your trust that way.”</p><p>“I’m not asking for severance,” I said, “but it is going to be <i>strictly platonic</i>, from now on.”</p><p>She laced her fingers through mine and for some reason, I let her. “So…this is kind of weird, but you could stay with me?”</p><p>I raised one eyebrow. “You’re right, that <i>is</i> kind of weird.” I thought about what I had told Megatron and I didn’t laugh, but I didn’t laugh because I wouldn’t have been laughing at her.</p><p>“You’re not saying no, though.” She looked at me hopefully.</p><p>“Why?” I asked, after a minute. “Why me? You had them make a <i>me</i> detector, but I put a tracker on you for a while, because you are the one who’s been chasing me, not the other way round.”</p><p>Let me tell you, the white faces some Camiens have can turn really, incredibly red.</p><p>“I’m not going to stay here for long,” I told her. “I need to get back to my family. I was willing to stay with him when I thought he was all alone here, but if he’s all alone, that’s his own doing. I’m leaving the next time we stop somewhere populated. I don’t care about the Knights of Cybertron. I care about helping Soundwave and stopping Galvatron.”</p><p>“Soundwave.” She nodded, and didn’t look at me. “I don’t think most people knew that you were in love with him.”</p><p>I laughed. “All the Decepticons did, Nautica. Most of the Autobots just couldn’t see it because of my frame.”</p><p>She bowed her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t around for the war, Ravage.”</p><p>“I know.”</p><p>“You’re pretty,” she said tentatively. “Even when I didn’t know how brilliant you were, I thought you were pretty. And even if you weren’t, you’d still be the femme who wrote all those poems about singing arm-in-arm with her lovers on the barricades. I looked up those riots. They censored the footage.” She frowned, with an intense, naïve disappointment that made me feel sympathy for her that I didn’t want.</p><p>“Of course they did.” I found myself laughing again, laughing at all the irony.</p><p>“That must have been you between Soundwave and Megatron. Who was the other mech?”</p><p>It took me a minute or two to decide what to say next. “Optimus Prime,” I told her, using the name I hated so much, and looked directly into her eyes. “Scorponok was so hacked off about that. He asked how many of us he had to frag to get the respect he deserved.”</p><p>Nautica was scandalised and started giggling, probably as much from the mental trauma as much as the humour of the thing. “Is that what it was really like back then? You’re not having me on?”</p><p>“Yes,” I said. “That’s what it really was like.” I fumbled a piece of crystal out of the glass and crunched it between my denta. I had a sense where this was going and I didn’t think she was only offering me a place to recharge that wasn’t the observation deck. “Don’t make me any offers, Nautica. I might accept. I don’t think ‘hacking Megatron off’ is a good enough reason.”</p><p>She leaned across the table. “I do,” she said, and kissed me. “I think it’s a fine reason.”</p><p>I was suddenly, deeply aware of how many people in that bar were staring at us. I was pretty sure a few of them were cheering. I couldn’t decide whether to crawl under the table or jump on top of it and pounce her, so I didn’t do either one. “Soundwave and I have done closer to four million acts than four. I’m going to ask him to be my conjunx. If he doesn’t ask me first.”</p><p>“You’re not married yet,” she said, and kissed me again. And I let her.</p><p>“I’m not,” I admitted. “But I’m putting the collar on you, pet.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0032"><h2>32. and wake in me unwilling love</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>We have chosen to make the lie true.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>"I can't remember the last thing that you said as you were leavin'<br/>Now the days go by so fast<br/>And it's one more day up in the canyons<br/>And it's one more night in Hollywood<br/>If you think that I could be forgiven I wish you would."</p><p>Soundtrack: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1D5PtyrewSs">Counting Crows</a>, "Long December"</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>I could almost hear Misfire’s voice in his return message.</p><p>
  <i>DS: <b>Cat</b>! You’re alive! And deleting stuff. You know that’s not going to do any good, right? Why’d you post it in the first place?</i>
</p><p>I laughed, but very quietly. Nautica was asleep with the diamond collar on her wrist. It hadn’t fit around her neck, but I’d put it on her anyway. I was thinking about leaving her with it.</p><p>
  <i>CC: Didn’t Lady Dezza tell you that Megatron posted it?</i>
</p><p>Misfire responded with a scattershot pattern of emoji, then finally used words.</p><p>DS:<i>Why… Is he trying to get you murdered? Rav, you didn’t—</i></p><p>
  <i>CC: Of course I did. You know my weaknesses. And I was furious. Soundwave ordered me to kill him.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>DS: That doesn’t sound like the Boss.</i>
</p><p> I wiped a tear off my keyboard. <i>CC:  I know. But I think maybe it was. I’ve hurt him a lot, without meaning to. And Megatron hurt him worse.</i></p><p>
  <i>DS: The Boss isn’t mad at you. We’re coming to get you. Crankcase is grumbling about it not being our business because we can’t tell him why, but he can pound slag, he’ll get over it. He called you a trophy wife. It was funny.</i>
</p><p>I wiped another few tears off the keyboard. <i>CC: I could count for one of those. But not yet.</i></p><p>
  <i>DS: Rav, he can’t ask you. You’re going to have to ask him. And you know why that is.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>CC: I’m not a cassette any more. Had that fixed. And yes, he knows. This is what I look like now.</i>
</p><p>I sent Misfire a selfie. I didn’t care that my optics were leaking.</p><p>I could hear him laughing in my head...despite the lag.</p><p><i>DS: You’re almost hot now, Rav,</i> he teased. <i>Who’s that next to you though?</i></p><p>
  <i>CC: Someone who needed some anti-Functionalist deprogramming.</i>
</p><p>I sent him another selfie, so he could see my smirk.</p><p>Misfire switched the video on, even though we still had the audio off, just so he could roll his optics at me.</p><p>
  <i>DS: How many Autobots?</i>
</p><p>I held up two fingers. <i>CC: And that counts Megatron.</i></p><p>He grinned at me. <i>DS: So not too many bad decisions. You going to give all of that up?</i></p><p>I winced and tried not to cry, but only succeeded at not making noise. <i>CC: Yeah. For the rest of my life.</i></p><p>He sighed in very obvious relief. Then he glanced away. <i>DS: So why did Megatron…?</i></p><p>
  <i>CC: I’ll tell you in person.</i>
</p><p>Misfire sucked air in, thinking. <i>DS: He could’ve waited till you’re off their ship to paint that target on your back.</i></p><p>I shook my head.</p><p>
  <i>CC: I actually think a lot of people <b>like</b> me here. There’s this bartender here, I can’t help thinking you’d like him. It’s such a weird feeling. Soundwave told me once, how he felt when they sent him away to that school when he’d just made some friends? It’s time to leave, and suddenly they all like me. I’d like to keep being friends with them, but I’m afraid we’re going to end up being enemies again someday, and the thing I want most is to bury my face in Soundwave’s chest and cry till I can’t anymore.</i>
</p><p>Misfire dabbed at his own optics.</p><p>
  <i>DS: Of course you’re BFFs with the bartender.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>CC: Just one of them. Pretty sure the other one hates me. The captain and I made out in his bar. And no I don’t mean Orange Crush.</i>
</p><p>Misfire rolled his optics again.</p><p>
  <i>DS: I guess that’s fortunate. I feel like I should warn you...for some reason Galvatron thinks calling you shareware will make him more popular.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>CC: Not with anyone who <b>matters</b>.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>DS: ’Course not. Can’t see how that could go wrong. So who’s this Lady Dezza? Do you mean EW? I always thought she was another jet. Are you saying she’s dating Deathsaurus?</i>
</p><p>
  <i>CC: Yes…and yes? She’s a Vaal beast.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>DS: Why didn’t you ever <i>tell</i> me? You always keep me up with the gossip.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>CC: …I thought you knew? I thought everyone did.</i>
</p><p>Misfire nodded.</p><p>
  <i>DS: They probably do now, after some of the things she posted. Have I ever actually met her, then?</i>
</p><p>
  <i>CC: You’d know that better than I would.</i>
</p><p>Behind him, something big stirred and <i>roared</i>. Nautica stirred and opened her eyes. “Why are you awake? And <i>how</i>?”</p><p>“I’m talking to my ride home,” I told her. “Go to sleep.”</p><p>“I thought they blocked your comms—” She yawned. “Oh right. You’re Soundwave’s girlfriend.”</p><p>”Not always a girl,” I said under my breath. “Not even most of the time.”</p><p>Misfire cracked up at the same time. “Intended conjunx, actually,” he said, loud enough for her to hear.</p><p>
  <i>CC: What the hell was that noise?</i>
</p><p>Misfire grinned.</p><p>
  <i>DS: I’ll tell you in person. Send us the rendezvous point as soon as you can.</i>
</p><p>Misfire signed off.  I lay back among the pillows and sighed, but there was another ping.  This one was from inside the ship.</p><p>
  <i>Megatron: Ravage. Answer me. I don’t want you to leave without a chance to explain myself.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Ravage: Go frag yourself. The thing you did was self-explanatory. I asked you not even to read that stuff. You’re the biggest trashfire ever to be struck from the Allspark.</i>
</p><p><i>Megatron: I know that.</i>
</p><p>Frag him. Why did he have to say that?</p><p>
  <i>Ravage: If you know that, then why are you bothering me?</i>
</p><p><i>Megatron: Ravage. You’ve said things people were desperate to hear. You’ve said things that I couldn’t say. Our people needed to hear those words.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Ravage: You put up an erotic poem I wrote about being my lover’s cassette, <b>scrapspike</b>. I’m pretty sure it ended up on Autobuddies; Swerve said they mostly published the racy ones.</i>
</p><p>Mortification flooded my brain.</p><p>I put up a firewall between the comm and my emotional processing subsystems.</p><p>
  <i>Ravage: Don’t you dare try to ‘face me through my comm.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Megatron: I didn’t. You were reaching out to me too.</i>
</p><p>I frowned. He was a manipulative scrapheap, but actually not a liar.</p><p>
  <i>Ravage: If I come to talk to you now, will you give me your sworn oath not to touch me?</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Megatron: Yes.</i>
</p><p>There was no hesitation there.</p><p>Nautica was out like a light. I got up and went into her washrack to scrub myself off a bit. He was standing outside the door to his habsuite when I got there.</p><p>“You are,” he said, “more beautiful in rage than you have ever been in submission.”</p><p>“I really need to thank you,” I said, “for making me understand exactly how much in love with Soundwave I am. And have always been. He would <i>never</i> have done that to me.”</p><p>“You’re absolutely right,” he said, and let me in.</p><p>“Are you really going to close the door,” I said as I sat down on the chair at his desk.</p><p>”This is a private conversation,” Megatron said. “I can’t apologise for publishing your essays. But perhaps I should’ve held off on the poetry. I didn’t have time to finish reading it all. I was enjoying it too much.”</p><p>“I’m not just leaving this room. I’m leaving the ship,” I blurted out. “We’re done, Megatron.”</p><p>Megatron closed his optics for a moment and was silent, before he let all of the air out of his vents. “I can’t be done with you,” he finally said. “You’re all I’ve got.”</p><p>“Then you don’t have anything,” I told him.</p><p>“I wanted this to be over. But now I see that this is impossible. You’re going to have to speak for the Undeceived from now on. You, Ravage. Not Soundwave. You. He’s a competent spymaster, and he’ll be a good commander. But everyone who matters always knew he was never your master. You were always his guiding star. I can’t ask out loud that those who refuse to renounce the badge come to you. I could only put you out where they can see you.” Megatron shrugged. “Soundwave can’t do this. You can.”</p><p>“Did you ever think to ask me if I wanted this?” I looked straight into his optics.</p><p>“You’ve been telling me you want this since they locked us in the closet together,” Megatron told me. “And you’re allowed to want this. But you’re not allowed to make me do it for you.”</p><p>I winced. “So that’s it. You’re just going to stay here and let them kill you, maybe.”</p><p>“Maybe.” He knelt in front of me. He didn’t make a move toward me, but he jiggered his chest panels open. The room was full of green brilliance.</p><p>I almost bolted. “I told you I can’t.”</p><p>“I’m not asking for that. I swore not to touch you,” he said. "Just…listen to me. I bid you stand in the glow of my spark that you may feel the heat of my words and know them to be true. For your wisdom and your caring and your endless faith, I invite you, Ravage, to receive my light and in doing so become my amica endura—from now until forever. As you are to me, may I be to you—today, tomorrow, and always.</p><p>He held out his hands. I didn’t take them, but I let mine hover above them, close enough to touch his field. How could making a vow like this feel like an ending?</p><p>After a moment, I opened my own spark chamber.</p><p>"I bid you stand in the glow of my spark that you may feel the heat of my words and know them to be true. For your stubbornness, your asinine self-assurance, and your determination to see every one of us free from all chains and all lies, I invite you, Megatron of Tarn, to receive my light and in doing so become my amica endura—from now until forever. As you are to me, may I be to you—today, tomorrow, and always.”</p><p>He stayed where he was, looking up at me with tears running down his cheeks. I thought I should probably feel very manipulated, but actually, I didn’t, not at all.</p><p>“I do love you,” he said, “but not the way Soundwave does. You’ll have in him what I didn’t have in Orion. Go home, and both of you: rise up.”</p>
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